The last universe

The last universe / William Sleator.— New York : Amulet Books, 2005.

215 p. ; 21 cm.

ISBN: 0810958589

1. Brothers and sisters – Fiction. 2. Maze gardens – Fiction. 3. Quantum theory – Fiction. 4. Science fiction. 5. Space and time – Fiction.

813.54

Susan hates pushing her brother around the garden in a wheelchair. It’s not her brother she minds, although they never were very close before he got so sick. It’s the garden that creeps her out. It’s so big and there’s the long dark passageway between overgrown trees before you come to the dark pond where her great-aunt drowned as a girl. Strange exotic flowers grow there. And when you look out the second story bathroom window you can see an overgrown maze in the center of it; but when you walk through the garden you can never find it. Until one day they do. It’s the day after they come back from the pond and the path moves and comes out at a different place than it has ever come out before.

An appropriately chilling story that entertainingly illustrates some of the strange concepts of quantum physics, including an appearance by Shrödinger’s famous cat that’s both alive and dead at the same time. In this garden the physics of the atomic and subatomic world became the physical laws of the larger world, and people, plants, animals, and universes become only clouds of possibilities before their own eyes.