Let me start out by saying that I have this weird attraction to emo girls.  In an anime context, I'm sure it's some kind of moe (not to be confused with emo) thing, but in general I'm not sure where it comes from.

My attraction to geek girls, however, makes perfect rational sense.  It's really hard not to love geek girls.  They are the epitome of awesomeness.  They aren't perpetually frozen in that middle-school mode of painted nails and microscopic zit inspections.  They don't rank the latest rap star wannabe higher than Doctor Who; they have a proper sense of priorities.  In a word, geek girls rock.

Which is exactly why you can't help but fall in love with Lexie Kepler, the protagonist of Ultraviolet Catastrophe.  See?  The geekiness even starts with the title. Any real geek knows about the ultraviolet catastrophe.

What?  You don't?  Well, for the benefit of the non-geek, the ultraviolet catastrophe was a term given to a problem in physics at the beginning of the 20th century.  According to classical physics, the equipartition theorem requires that energy be divided equally among all oscillators.  If you have a piece of red-hot iron, however much energy it is emitting in red light, it must also emit at every other frequency.  As you move to bluer colors, into the ultraviolet and beyond, there are more and more frequencies, relatively speaking.  In a nutshell, it if radiates anything at all, it must radiate infinite energy.  Explaining how the world summarily wasn't destroyed by a piece of hot iron is what led to the development of quantum mechanics.  Incidentally, I'm sure Lexie hit upon this Wikipedia page about the Rayleigh-Jeans Law.

One might conclude that the author is geek girl herself, not only to know this but to craft a well-written story around it.  One of my first observations about the novel is that it is geek heaven. This is a novel by a geek, for geeks, about geeks.  The person plagued with the misfortune of being a non-geek might miss out on the spiritual impact of a "Because Science" T-shirt, the import of a sonic screwdriver, or the details of hacking a firewall, but they'll get by, I suppose.  The geek angle is evident at the beginning, but when Lexie arrives at Quantum Technologies, it's total immersion.

One little detail blew me away: using a particle related to the Higgs boson to create a wormhole.  OK, Einstein-Rosen bridge, but only a true geek will know that term.  Let's see, unknown relatives to the Higgs are theorized, interaction with the Higgs field is responsible for mass, according to general relativity mass is responsible for space-time geometry, and wormholes are a consequence of the Einstein field equations for general relativity.  So it should be obvious to a competent geek that if there is a particle that could induce a wormhole, it would probably be the Higgs or something very similar.  That is an incredible attention to detail that I'm afraid might be lost on the non-geek reader.

You know it's going to be an adventure from the very first sentence: You know your life is never going to be the same when your mom pulls a gun at the shopping mall.  Now that's how I like to start a story.  In machine-gun fashion, 16-year-old Lexie finds that her parents have been drugging her to keep her "normal," an evil scientific organization has been searching for her most of her life, she's really a genius of a special sort, and, potentially, the world is about to end.

At that point, it starts getting weird.  Can't say much more than that.

I will say, though, that at points it borders on teen erotica.  OK, be offended if you want.  I mean, sexuality doesn't start until your 18th birthday, right?  The law says so.  Bull.  I've worked with kids that age extensively and I know what goes through their minds.  As a matter of fact, I was one once.  No, nothing really happens in the book, but it's talked about, speculated upon, and sometimes the description of Lexie's responses to Asher's passionate embrace could make a pig break out in a sweat.  (Geeks know that pigs have hardly any sweat glands.)  No, this is a good thing.  That's exactly what goes though an adolescent's mind, and I'm glad that Grey has the courage to tell it like it is and not bury it under some cloak of imagined respectability.  This is real teenage-ness, and yes, geeks think about sex, too.

This is mystery/adventure story that can appeal to everyone, but which is like Solomon's Gardens to the geek.  It's merely a great indie novel to everyone else, a carefully crafted plot full of twists and surprises, trust and betrayal, nefarious sophistry, murder, manipulation, and maybe an end to the world.  Just the way I like them.

Suppose the ultraviolet catastrophe really happened....