Today I’ll be talking about a book you’ve probably drooled over because hello, just look at that gorgeous cover. Yes, that’s right, today I’m talking about THE LOVE THAT SPLIT THE WORLD by Emily Henry as part of the THE LOVE THAT SPLIT THE WORLD blog tour!
The Love That Split the World
Author: Emily Henry
Series: None
Genre: Young Adult, Romance, Fantasy, Mystery
Release Date: January 26, 2016
Publisher: Razorbill
Summary:
Natalie’s last summer in her small Kentucky hometown is off to a magical start…until she starts seeing the “wrong things.” They’re just momentary glimpses at first—her front door is red instead of its usual green, there’s a pre-school where the garden store should be. But then her whole town disappears for hours, fading away into rolling hills and grazing buffalo, and Nat knows something isn’t right.
That’s when she gets a visit from the kind but mysterious apparition she calls “Grandmother,” who tells her: “You have three months to save him.” The next night, under the stadium lights of the high school football field, she meets a beautiful boy named Beau, and it’s as if time just stops and nothing exists. Nothing, except Natalie and Beau.
Emily Henry’s stunning debut novel is Friday Night Lights meets The Time Traveler’s Wife, and perfectly captures those bittersweet months after high school, when we dream not only of the future, but of all the roads and paths we’ve left untaken.
First Sentence: The day before my last official day of high school, she comes back.
The Interview
1. Hi Emily! Can you tell us something we don’t know about you, something we won’t discover from a simple Google search?
After writing, my second love is modern dance! I studied it in college and was in my school’s affiliated dance company, so that was how I spent most of my time despite being a Creative Writing major.
2. What was your first thought when you saw your book’s cover?
It was pretty much that spinning wheel of color that pops up whenever my computer’s overwhelmed. There weren’t really words! I’d heard how little input authors usually got into that sort of thing so I’d thoroughly prepared myself for anything. Except, apparently, a perfect cover. It was so exactly what I wanted it to be. It really felt like Anthony, the designer, had dug through my brain. I set the as my phone’s background and stared at it all day. Whenever I looked for too long, I’d start crying!
3. In five words, how would you describe the romance between Natalie and Beau?
Electric, tender, complementary, messy, abiding.
4. What’s that one thing you just can’t seem to get right the first time when you write?
Hmm… maybe foreshadowing. I tend to dive into writing before I have any idea what a book is about, so I usually don’t know exactly where things are going until I’ve finished a first draft. Then I usually have to weave back in other elements and cut the stuff that doesn’t make sense anymore. Really, there’s a lot I don’t get right the first time I write because of my process, but it’s really important to me that I get the characters right in the first draft because everything builds off them!
5. What inspired you to write The Love That Split the World?
So many different things collided to push this book out of me. It was summer, and I’m always incredibly nostalgic in summer. My boyfriend (now husband) and I were both sort of stuck in weird in-between phases of life, the kind where you really miss stuff from the past but also feel so eager to move forward. We went out for a walk one night, and it was humid and buggy and golden, and I felt an overwhelming swell of both nostalgia and deja vu regarding the summer I graduated high school. I had such similar feelings at that time–a desperate wish to hold onto what I was leaving and an eagerness to move forward, to find myself. With those feelings came a strong desire to write. I had a different book out with publishers at the time, but I’d never felt so excited or nervous to start something as I felt with The Love That Split the World. I wanted to capture all of the feelings of that summer in particular, but also of all the summers I spent in Kentucky as a kid.
I’d also always wanted to write about hypnopompic hallucinations, a dream state in which your body is awake but your mind isn’t, because I’ve had on occasion throughout my life. I think I had more my senior year of high school than during the rest of my life combined, so maybe that was why the two ideas became synced in my mind. I just wanted to explore a fantastical or scientific reasoning behind why you would encounter these sorts of things when you’re stressed out, to sort of play with the idea of the hallucinations as windows within times when we’re pulled in a lot of different directions and trying to anticipate where all those different paths could lead. Basically I wanted to create a magical exaggeration of what those in-between times in life feel like.
January 19th Reading Teen
January 20th It Starts At Midnight
January 21st The Hollow Cupboards
January 22nd Owl Almost Be Reading
January 25th Fiction Fare
January 26th Buttermybooks
January 27th The Hardcover Lover
January 28th Effortlessly Reading
January 29th A Midsummer Night’s Read
February 1st The Forest of Words and Pages
February 2nd Love Is Not A Triangle
February 3rd The Book Addict’s Guide
February 4th Once Upon A Twilight
February 5th MuggleNet
Yaaay for new blog post :D I miss you Kelly. <3 Thank you for sharing about this book :) It looks SO PRETTY. Your interview is awesome :)
This book sounds so trippy and fun. *adds to TBR*
Kat C recently posted…The Cost of All Things by Maggie Lehrman
Great interview! I really want to read this book now lol
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