Age: High School-Adult
Math: Spirals and helixes in nature and life

Sedgwick bowls me over again with his intertwining, intergenerational, inter-genre stories that fuse together over one theme: spirals and helixes. Opening with diagrams of a spiral and a helix, Sedgwick presents four stories that he encourages to be read in any order:

Spoiler

a paleolithic girl is inspired by the shape of a spiral to create written words;

a midwife's daughter in the 1600s is accused of witchcraft and is perplexed by the underwater presence of a spiral upon a rock; a doctor in the 1920s cares for an "insane asylum" patient that is petrified of spirals; and a spaceship caretaker in the far future blacks out whenever he sees a spiral.

Spoiler

I guess my interpretation of the spiral is that time is relentlessly pushing forward and if we remain fixated on its progression, then we become slaves to it, lost in its mathematical perfection.

I probably wouldn't recommend this to readers that hate historical fiction, science fiction, prose, or head scratchers because this includes them all and is particularly appealing to non-picky readers. I'd LOVE to hear what others think of it!