This is a heartfelt, engaging story, the wonderful amalgamation of whimsy and creativity, with just that tinge of melancholy, that Mike Chen does so well. Considering the structure and plotting of this story, the heft of the novel has to be carried by the characters, and our two primary leads are more than up for it. They are both interesting, quirky, and feel genuine. Plus, we get to see them grow and evolve in believable ways, and I really enjoyed spending time with both of them.

The story was very readable, I didn’t want to put it down and it read very quickly. But, that said, there is something to be said about whether we really need another time-loop story. There are various deviations of that plot device which have been explored over and again, and while this one did it expertly I am not sure how much it moved the needle, in any way. Two-thirds into the story Chen smartly takes some surprising swerves that keeps the story interesting, and I had fun the whole time. I actually wish I could have spent more time with the characters, and fallen deeper into their relationship. For plot reasons we only got to see little glimpses of their relationship as it grew and developed, and I do wish there could have been a little more, there, that’s where I felt coziest. And this story is definitely a cozy love story at heart, disguised as a near-future sci-fi romp. Not everything needs to shape the cultural zeitgeist, I suppose. The characters and story are fun, the homage to the many time-loop and time-travel stories of the past very firmly in place, and while it wasn’t very surprising I also never felt like it was derivative or repetitive. It was uplifting, entertaining, and I’m glad I had the chance to read it.

(Rounded up from 3.5)

I want to thank the author, the publisher Harlequin Trade Publishing, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

This was a fun love story. I liked the new direction Chen took the whole novel. Around 60-75% it slowed down a bit, with Carter's memory lapsing. I thought Chen wrote Mariana's character well, after she got over some of her initial trauma. The concept of the 'time' travel being memory based was interesting. I will keep reading Chen.

Mike Chen does it again! Every one of his books I have read so far I have highly enjoyed! Such a fun and enjoyable story to read! Mariana and Carter were fun main characters to follow along to on this time loop tale! I really like how friendship centered this story remained until closer to the end. The story really was also a great example as how human beings even if we want to be alone, we still also crave that interaction with others.

Through the novel, we see Mariana and Carter face many challenges and master the art of patience. Their strategizing for each time loop by mental memory is crazy! It shows how powerful our mind is and what we can remember if we need to.

Mariana and her sacrifice to go back in time to stop the loop is such a powerful part to this story and one of my favorites. She risked everything to save her younger self's, Carter's, and everyone else's futures. I really like how the story ended and seeing she made it possible for Carter and her to cross paths and begin a hopefully long life together.

3.75 - There were parts of A Quantum Love Story that I thoroughly enjoyed, but it ultimately left me feeling dissatisfied and unconvinced.

There were some pacing issues early on — Carter talks about food SO MUCH when there was a mystery we could have been solving.

The middle section had me hooked.

The end just left me with a lot of questions and a skeptical frown.

Thanks to NetGalley and Harlequin for providing an advanced copy for me to review.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I have really enjoyed every previous book by Mike Chen. Looking back, they have all either received a 4 or 5 star rating from me. One thing that he really does wonderfully well is to take an interesting sci-fi concept (time travel, post-apocalypse, vampires, etc.) and creates realistic characters that live within these worlds. This book fell short in my opinion in one of those aspects.

While the concept of a time loop is something I immensely enjoy, I do think the concept can become stale quickly. To keep things from getting too repetitive (which is difficult in a time loop), the characters have to be compelling. Neither of the leads in this book, unfortunately, were very compelling. Carter didn't really do much but take notes and eat, and Mariana kept reminiscing about her dead friend. Nothing really stood out about either of them, and I thought it was strange how Carter basically forced her into the time loop with him. The romantic aspect between the two didn't ever click with me either. It felt more like a relationship built out of convenience than compatibility.

I'll definitely give Mike Chen another chance as this was the first out of six books that I haven't liked.

Carter Cho is trapped in a 4 day time loop, he can eat whatever he wants and has been taking copious notes to help him figure out an escape. He finally realizes that the best way out is to bring someone else in - enter Mariana. The two spend endless loops figuring out how to fix the issue which caused the loop while enjoying the benefits of resets to life every four days (i.e., no ramifications). At some point Carter begins to lose his memory and Mariana is on her own to save the world.

While some stories gloss over the time travel aspects a bit for the sake of the story and so you have to just go with it, this novel does the opposite and goes so deep into it I almost missed the gloss over. The story and characters were sweet and I personally really enjoyed how much Carter relished the fact that if you are in a time loop you can eat whatever you want (because that’s what I would do) - but in general the novel never really drew me in like I would have liked and I’m not sure why. The characters were cute but since all relationships remained at a distance so did my interest.

3.5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and MIRA for the ARC for review

What would you do if you were trapped in a four day time loop? Eat anything you want, spend anything you want? How much of life resets every four days? How long does it take you to get bored or break out?

Carter Cho is stuck in a time loop, so he does the best thing he can think of and traps Marianna in it with him. What could go wrong trapping a near total stranger in a time loop with you?

I love a Groundhog’s Day scenario and Mike Chen delivers a delightful tale with Quantum Love Story. There’s science, there’s time loops, there’s cooking, there’s questioning what we choose to do with our lives. It’s a charming tale of missing loved ones, estranged relationships with family, not living the life you thought you would, and how to start over. And over. And over. Four days at a time.

It’s not too heavy on the science, and it’s a fun caper.

(Transcribed from video)

I enjoyed this book! In fact, I enjoyed it a lot. This novel is like a four-way cross between Groundhog Day, Maniac (that Netflix show with Jonah Hill and Emma Stone), Palm Springs (that Adam Sandberg movie), and that one episode of Futurama (you know the one). Time travely goodness with bonus time loopery! Oh, I love me a story with a time loop. I want to see all the little differences that happen each time through, how stuff gets memorized and planned out and perfected.

I absolutely poured through the first 25% of it, though it slowed a bit for me around 25-50% of the way through. It got a little repetitive, what with the time loops and everything, though that’s probably to be expected. The story follows Carter and Mariana. Carter gets stuck in a time loop, drags Mariana in. Mariana, meanwhile, is still getting over the death (possibly…missing person…body never found) of her best friend and new sister, Shay. So, lots going on.

It hits that 50% mark right when you think it’s going to become romantic and then, suddenly, complications arrive. Thankfully, not one of those annoying miscommunication tropes that could easily be solved by having a conversation, but memory loss! And not like an amnesia thing, dragged straight out of a K-drama (although I would have enjoyed that immensely), but science! Memory regression! It actually makes sense if you know what’s going on in the story. The science was science-ing. I don’t know anything about science but it felt good and science-y. You know how Star Trek is good about making stuff sound like it makes sense even when you don’t know what they’re talking about? It all sounded like it made sense, even when I didn’t really know what was going on.

And then stuff starts getting dragged out of the past and into the future, things start going awry, actual time travel occurs inside of the time loop; so much good stuff going on. Carter is using most of the time loop to eat all kinds of food, Mariana has this obsession with Tennis and the US Open and Wimbledon that I don’t personally understand, but everybody’s got to have a thing, right? They’re both kind of neurodivergent, which I appreciate, as a neurospicy person myself.

It really picked up about halfway through and then I couldn’t put it down again. It was crazy. Two things I will mention: a dog does die in the book, and although it’s natural causes and expected and the dog was only in the book for like 5 pages, I cried like a baby (it was sad and pathetic and I am unashamed); also, the ending… Did I like the ending? Yes, I did. Was I satisfied with the epilogue? No. No, I was not. I wanted *more*. I wanted *specifics*. I’m *selfish*.

Overall, though, I give the book: 7½ glazed donuts because it was a pretty sweet read. I enjoyed it very, very much. It was…outside of my expectations, in a good way. It was unpredictable, which I adore. I highly recommend that you read this book and, if you don’t, time travel back and make a better choice.

This is my first Mike Chen read and it was a great book to read during the holidays. I love a good time travel/time loop story and this one reminded me of a mix between Ground Hog Day and Passengers. This is a mix of science fiction and romance and has great themes of grief, hope, and friendship. It really made me think about how precious the little things are. This one is out next year on 1/30!

3.85 stars

Review posts to my blog on January 10th, 2024

I love time loop stories. One of my favorite things is that they’ve been around for long enough that authors can play with the conventions of an established genre. A QUANTUM LOVE STORY does this to fantastic effect, using memory, food, and a plausible but loose edition of quantum mechanics to build a story of two people trying to escape a time loop. It’s about grief, sacrifice, and care for oneself and others. There’s an emphasis on the importance of fully inhabiting moments. Not every single one, necessarily, but learning to regularly take the time to enjoy food as more than fuel, learn new things, and appreciate small interactions.

Because the story starts from Carter’s perspective, and then switches to Mariana, pretty early on, I thought it first that the point of view would switch back-and-forth between them. Instead, most of the book is from Mariana's perspective. With Carter as the more personally spontaneous one, indulging his love of good food as his bank account resets with each loop, staying in Mariana’s perspective means that we see her growing appreciation for the way Carter surprises her, and how he chooses to cultivate moments of calm and enjoyment in stressful circumstances that seem like they’ll never end. I like the way they strategize through the iterations, figuring out how to keep their research progress across the loops, using the only seemingly durable resource they have, Carter’s eidetic memory, and Mariana’s less precise but scientifically enhanced recall.

There’s a turning point where Carter’s memory stops helping them, and Mariana has to make the most of her time with him before, eventually, a loop starts where he has no idea who she is and she must figure out a solution to their problem on her own. I have a particular interest in stories where protagonists risk the possibility of their own non-existence in the course of trying to make things better. I don't just mean death, but the loss of other people's memories of who someone was and what they did. One of the staples of time loop stories as a genre is the frustration and futility of trying to convince those who don’t remember the loops that anything strange is happening at all. It creates this lopsided balance of access to information, where as the loops continue one person knows more and more about the other, but the non-looping person doesn’t get to reciprocate in a fully informed way. You can create an increasing sense of isolation as the closer the looper gets to someone in their life, the more intimate they feel about details that took a very long time for the other person to tell them. Having two people loop solves some of that, but the onset of memory loss means that eventually this imbalance happens anyway. It's made all the more poignant Carter and Mariana spent so long progressing as partners, with fairly symmetrical access to information once a few loops had happened where Mariana was up to speed. Having that intimacy and then losing it piles on grief and heartbreak, especially since Mariana was grieving her missing stepsister and best friend, Shay, who vanished several months ago and is presumed dead. The loop at first gave her time to process that loss in a way she hadn’t been able to before, but then it piles on new loss when Carter’s memory starts fading.

Narratively, I love the ending. It’s perfect for the story, and I wouldn’t change a thing. Emotionally, fuck you Mike Chen (appreciatively) for making me feel this much in this manner. You took one of my favorite sub-genres and added a masterwork to the canon. I look forward to how your next book inevitably shatters me in the best ways.

What a fun take on time travel. I was a little frustrated at the lack of science, though. Think more Groundhog Day less Primer.
If you go into this expecting a romance story, I think you’ll be happier than expecting a sci-fi story. There are just too many implausibilities and not enough exposition to make the plot work for me. I generally get fussy when all stories think there must be a love-interest to make someone read it. I didn’t really find the romance part that intersting or necessary. Having the main charachter do what she does because she wants to save the world or something would be far more reasonable for the scenario.
It was a fast-paced, well-written story so no problems getting through it. I was afraid the ending would feel rushed, but the pacing was nice and consistent throughout the story.

A Quantum Love Story is the definitive time-loop romance, and one for the ages. I quantum loved it.

Mike Chen has already proven he can write an exceptional time-travel story. His debut novel (Here And Now And Then) is one of my favourites in the genre, but this latest offering is on a different level. A Quantum Love Story takes the concept of a time-loop and dares to twist it into a brand new shape. It’s one of the most accessible, character-driven, enjoyable, and downright awesome books I’ve read in what feels like forever.

The premise is a familiar one. Boy meets girl. Boy brings girl into a Groundhog Day-esque time-loop. Boy and girl fall in love. Then stuff gets CRAZY!

As with all love stories, it juggles its sweetness with suspense, leaving you on the cusp of “will they / won’t they” until the very last word. There’s a feeling of build and momentum which is present here that’s extremely impressive when you consider that these characters are stuck in a loop. And as for the characters themselves, these might just be my favourite Mike Chen creations yet.

One of the standout features of Chen’s writing is his ability to craft relatable and believable characters. Well, he’s raised the bar even further this time. I fell in love with Mariana and Carter long before they fell for each other! Their quirks and habits, the subtlety of their nuances, their flaws and foibles — it all added up to make them feel like more than just characters. They felt alive. There’s nothing idealised about them. They’re an absolute joy to imagine in every layer and dimension, and they’ll live with me for a long time yet.

One of the most exciting things about the experience of reading A Quantum Love Story is how it helped me come to terms with the claustrophobia of a time-loop. The themes it throws up are so well-considered, and it’ll get you thinking about the nature of time. Is it a trap? Is it a gift? Is there freedom in the passing of a second? How do our relationships evolve without time? For anybody who’s contemplated how our identity and relationships are affected by the march of days, weeks, months, and years, this is destined to give you plenty to think about. But it never feels like a dense or heavy read. It’s fun, but not frivolous. There’s a huge amount of merit and worth that it manages to pack into its punch.

Also, after reading this story, you’ll never take the simple pleasure of a glazed donut for granted ever again!

Comparison titles should be really obvious with this one, but they aren’t! Groundhog Day. Palm Springs. Looper. Live, Die, Repeat (Edge Of Tomorrow). Those are all time-loop movies. But it didn’t really feel like any of them. The atmosphere made it more like a heist story, with a “save the world” sub-plot that kept surprising me. If anything, it’s more of Mission Impossible meets When Harry Met Sally. It’s what Passengers tried to pull off: a genuine genre-blend that makes its own rules and is sure to please sci-fi fans as well as die-hard romantics.

I would happily read this book over and over again in a four day loop. A Quantum Love Story is a masterpiece. I’ve often said that I’ve yet to meet a time-travel story I didn’t like. But this is one that I truly and wholeheartedly adored. Go and read it, and get ready to fall in love.

I enjoyed this book. I thought the premise was interesting - anything about time travel is always going to pull me in! And I found the characters very interesting and relatable.

I enjoyed the world that was built and how the future that was presented felt very possible. I also loved Carter and Mariana’s dynamic and was rooting for them from the start!

My main complaint with this book, and why I’m not rating it 4 stars, is that there were a lot of unanswered questions and it felt very disjointed.

The first half of the book felt very slow and completely different from the 2nd half of the book. I also thought it was odd that we got Carter’s point of view for most of it and then it just disappeared. I understand the reasoning for that choice, but I would’ve liked to stay with Carter for the entire book.

The ending was very unsatisfying to me as well. I feel like there was a better way to do it to make really give them both a happy ending (which I believe is what the author was trying to do).

All in all this was a fun read and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys romcoms and New YA sci-fi, as long as you don’t care too much about all the time travel/science adding up perfectly.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. All thoughts and statements are my own.

I have a strange relationship with Mike Chen's books. Here and Now and Then was the first I read and it was astonishingly beautiful and I absolutely loved it. Since then I have struggled with each of his titles, despite always being intrigued by his concepts. For some reason, I have not been able to find my way into his writing since that first book.

When I saw that he had another time travel story, I thought that maybe I would have more luck and so requested it. It started out very strong and I thought I was once again going to rediscover the magic of Chen's storytelling. Unfortunately, largely given the nature of the story itself, I rather quickly found this one to feel repetitive in ways that, while they might be necessary for driving the plot points forward, made for a bit of a slog as far as a reading experience... Still, the concept was intriguing and I did enjoy the characters and way their situation was developing - although eventually the repetitive nature did get to be a bit too much and I started skimming for a little while. I also found the flashbacks, especially regarding shay, to be inserted oddly and to not necessarily feel like they were adding all that much . I felt like the relationship between the women was well established without adding them in, and they really pulled me out of the main storyline - especially since they were inserted without any indication that they were coming. Perhaps a visual offset or something would help with that? Still, I really wanted to see how things resolved themselves, and didn't want to set the book down - although almost did a couple times....

Finally things begin to shift and went in crazy directions that I did not at all see coming, with major turns and twists. I did feel as though it tied up tidily and vast quantities of time and experience were skimmed over in the final quarter of the book, in a way that felt fairly dissonant given the incredible attention to detail in the first three quarters. It all felt a little conveniently happy-ended, but I still found it to be an intriguing story and worth the read. It would make for a very cool movie or miniseries.

A Quantum Love Story begins with Carter, a technician who works at the Hawke Accelerator, being stuck in a time loop caused by an incident at the particle accelerator. He is able to help Mariana, who is a neuroscientist and visitor to the site, become aware of also being in the time loop. They have four days to try to resolve the situation before it all starts over again.

The scenario in the novel is an interesting one. The reader is drawn in to the story immediately, and the author does an excellent job with character development. Mike Chen is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors.

I love me a good time travel novel so I was looking forward to trying out this new one by Mike Chen. I appreciated the characters and loved their initial connection/friendship once they found themselves in the situation. However it started to get a bit tedious in the middle and the ending felt extremely rushed. I think part of it was that the characters didn’t always progress in our level of getting to know them. Their interests (1-2) were established early and they didn’t really open up enough to us as readers to get to know them better. It felt a bit surface. I’m looking forward to reading more of Chen’s books down the line but this one was just middling for me. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Once in a while, I decide to try a book on a whim, one that maybe sits a little outside my usual genres, and it winds up completely by surprise. This was the case with Mike Chen’s A Quantum Love Story, a book that - as suggested by the title - blends science and romance together to tell a story that is every bit as twisty and surprising as the quantum physics and time loops that make up the plot.

(OK I don’t know if that last bit makes sense, I was the bane of my physics teacher’s existence)

The story is set in the year 2094 and follows Carter and Mariana, who become trapped in a time loop, repeating the same four days over and over again following an incident at the facility where Carter works. Since they are the only two who remember each loop when it resets, it becomes up to them to find a way to break the cycle.

Their adventures become increasingly drastic, and eventually infused with a sort of carpe diem energy, especially since the start of a new loop brings no consequences from the last one. The two of them, so mired in grief and feelings of indequacy that have held them back for so long, slowly begin to heal with each new loop, and begin to discover a growing attraction between them. What a shame, then, when Carter’s memories of each loop begin to fade.

While I would not call this a “romance novel” per se, make no mistake that Carter and Mariana’s feelings for each other, and what each of them is willing to do for the other in the name of possibly having a future together outside of the loop, is right at the heart of the story. The central mystery surrounding the time loops themselves is an absolute roller coaster, with each perceived solution being followed closely by the next piece in the puzzle, throwing the pair for…well, a new loop.

A Quantum Love Story is one of those winding, engaging books that had me absolutely hooked from the start. While physics was never my forte, the science in the book remained accessible enough that I could follow along with little issue. But really, it’s Carter and Mariana, and the hope that the two of them will find a way to make it work, that proves to be the emotional throughline of the book, and it definitely didn’t disappoint.

A Quantum Love Story hits shelves on January 30, 2024. Special thank you to Netgalley and MIRA for the advance copy for review purposes.

I have a very high bar for time travel and time loop stories because it is extremely difficult to make the stories compelling without relying on repetition and magic. This one kind of fell flat for me even though I normally like Mike Chen’s writing style. I spent the first half of the book trying to decide if I wanted to DNF, it dragged that much.

I am glad I finished ultimately, because the payoff was only in the end and it is a very slow buildup to an abrupt, heartbreaking blowup of the characters. Save the world but with the only variable you can’t plan for; the romance can’t be saved, which was disappointing for the romance fan in me. In fact these characters just seemed to keep living their normal lives even though they knew they needed to change. Only the time loop and their romance would change them and change the world, the heartbreaking but interesting paradox of it all that made the ending pay off for its interesting philosophical dilemma.

I would describe this as a modern day Lessons in Chemistry meets Groundhog Day. Reading the author’s afterword made it make much more sense, as it was his way of processing pandemic isolation, which indeed often felt like a repetitive time loop with fleeting moments of human connection.

Mariana is a neuroscientist working with the ReLive project, a firm developing perfect memory recall. She loves tennis and is in mourning for her stepsister and best friend Shay. She visits the Hawke accelerator project one day, where she becomes trapped in a time loop with Carter Cho, a technician who’s obsessed with food and cooking, who has a photographic memory.

I think what fell flat for me was their romance felt forced. It felt like Carter selfishly pulled Mariana into the loop to not be lonely, and then Mariana was willing to risk it all based on one kiss on a cruise ship. I liked how they were opposing personalities - Carter’s spontaneous chaos to Mariana’s calm, orderly control - who brought each other out of their shells, but I didn’t find their chemistry compelling. Their characterizations were also extremely repetitive. Carter’s always writing in his yellow notebook and thinking about pastries; Mariana’s always obsessing over Shay and tennis. I wish their personalities had been given more depth and complexity and we dug deeper into their traumas and pasts beyond every detail with Mariana and Shay. I also found the memory aspects intriguing but they never made much of a difference in the plot. I thought grief was handled very well here though. Mariana was the most interesting and fleshed out character.

I never really felt like I got to know Carter, though, beyond how he was always thinking of how to feed Mariana or he didn’t get along with his parents. Too much food! Please give him some other interests, and I’m a foodie. Then he just abruptly drops off the plot when one loop he forgets that she exists, starting with forgetting their kiss. The romance was starting to make sense then and then it just died. I knew this wasn’t a romance going into it though so I didn’t need the HEA to find enjoyment out of the story, but I was still disappointed with the incredibly practical ending. Even though the intriguing part was that it also needed to be that way to save the world. Frustrating, repetitive and also somehow still intriguing in a very slow burn way.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance review copy. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

While an interesting concept, the fake science of this book was difficult to break into. We jumped right into the plot (great), but the fake scientific explanations given didn't work for me. I also had trouble connecting to the characters because the two protagonists seemed to lack a chemistry integral to their relationship moving forward. Overall, I really wanted to like this book, but it did not work for me.

great book and loved the mystery through out the book. I loved the characters and how they grew through all of their adventures. I enjoyed this book and this author and will check them out again add them to my reading pile.