Emily Henry is a full-time writer, proofreader, and donut connoisseur. She studied creative writing at Hope College and the New York Center for Art & Media Studies, and now spends most of her time in Kentucky. Find her on Twitter @EmilyHenryWrites. You can find more of my reviews of Emily Henry's works here.
Natalie's last summer in her small Kentucky hometown is off to a magical start . . . until she starts seeing the "wrong things." At first, they're just momentary glimpses—her front door is red instead of its usual green, there's a preschool 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. Then there are the visits from the kind and 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.
Natalie's identity and her past, her character, are vital points of information in understanding this story. As it is with most story, buying into the main character's motivations is important in understanding the choices they make to reach the ending. Henry does a good job crafting all of Natalie's emotions and her motivations, exploring all the aspects of her life, leaving no stone unturned. Lots of reviewers appreciate Natalie's vulnerability and her focus on feminism, however, not many reviewers that I've seen have pointed out how Natalie's Native American heritage deeply influenced the telling of this story. Emily Henry used First Nation stories to point Natalie in the right direction, First Nations whose stories are acknowledged in the acknowledgements section at the end. I am not sure how many identities Emily Henry shares with her main character, and many reviewers appreciate the diversity this story brings to young adult fiction. As this was published in 2016, the discussions on what authors should write based on how authors identity wasn't mainstream yet, but I'm convinced contemporary readers would find some problems with Henry's decision to write a Native American main character whose arc and motivations are extremely influenced by being an adopted Native American teenager. I would not be the font of information on how well Henry does with depicting this kind of main character, as far as the representations of a dark-skinned Native American adopted teenager, but I could tell that a lot of Henry's energy went into crafting Natalie as a vulnerable, emotional, and very real character for all readers. While all of this was very necessary to the story, I felt like it was also very necessary so that Natalie's character could feel as authentic as possible, when written by a lighter skinned author. Even though I am shaky on this depiction, I would like to say that I was very much in love with all of the First Nation stories she brought into the story, and gives a reader like me a new appreciation for the types of stories possible.
Some of my favorite scenes in this book are the ones earlier on, when Beau and Natalie are still learning each other and trying to understand their odd situation. These scenes are written so beautifully, as they're full of a balance of tension that makes you always wonder what the next sentence is going to be with that butterfly feeling you get when you have a crush so intense it overwhelms you. A lot of reviewers on Goodreads categorize the romance between Natalie and Beau as instalove, and I find it difficult to disagree with this statement. However, I don't think the instalove is a con for the book itself, and certainly is not a con for what the story is trying to say. In fact, the instalove is not the point of the story. We just have to believe that two teenagers could love each other intensely, love each other so much that they would want to see what a future would be like with the both of them in it, without any other worlds in the way. Until then, we can't appreciate how much love already fills the pages: Natalie's love for her high school friends, and Natalie's love for her family. We aren't meant to explore the romance between Natalie and Beau—it is just meant to be, a fact of the world that we're in, so that we could see what the two of them were going to do about it. I go more in depth on this in the last paragraph of this review, so I highly suggest reading on to see why the romance, the instalove, is not the point, and is fact necessary so that Henry could make the points she was making with this book.
I'm starting to think this was the book that started my fascination with time in literature, because time is just so apparent in this book! This book has been (sporadically) categorized as a mix of science fiction, fantasy, paranormal, and magical realism. No one really knows, which is part of what makes this story so magical. It feels like Emily Henry decided to get rid of genre and just tell a story, reflective of the kinds of creation stories she retells within the book's pages. It is so fun to see Henry bending the boundaries of genre to tell this story, even if it means we get a little lost along the way. For example, there are a few instances of info-dumps, where Alice explains theories related to time and memory. While maybe some of the concrete information might have been lost on me, I could appreciate how Henry would write these intense, emotional, magical scenes and then balance them with scientific, logical explanations. I will say that Henry did a wonderful job taking what must have been explanations laden with scientific jargon and boiling it down to its simplest form and putting them in the novel—I do believe the information she had had to have been more complex, and she must have decoded it to put explanations that would make the most sense in the final version of the text. While I might not have it in me to explain back to someone the theories I read about in The Love That Split the World, I had enough of an understanding of what was happening to know exactly what happened at that ending, and to appreciate truly all the hoops all the Natalies jumped to, to get to that last closing moment.
It's been a few years since this book was published, so I feel okay talking a bit about this ending here. If you haven't read the ending, I suggest not reading this paragraph! Essentially, the mainstream interpretation is that when Natalie decides to sacrifice herself at the end, she ends up creating a third world in which both she and Beau survive, fall in love again, and have their happening ending with the house with the porch like they imagine. This ending stunned me when I first read it: the power, the faith, the bravery, and the absolute love it would have to take to make a monumental decision like this astounded me, and left me feeling both full and empty at the exact same time. Henry had to craft a character who we as readers would believe would make this decision, while also crafting a love story worthy of such a sacrifice. I believe she succeeded at this, and this goes back to my earlier point—we had to buy into this quick love she formed with Beau, and this love she had for everyone around her. This ending hinged on the type of character Natalie was, and it all tied together more intricately than we could have imagined before opening this book. This book was certainly a gift, a study itself on how intensely we can love and be loved, and refusing to recognize that point at its core (instead pointing at all the things we dislike) would be a disservice to the kind of story Henry actually told.
Thank goodness that there are more published books by Emily Henry to enjoy! Since this debut, Henry has published three other young adult books titled A Million Junes, When the Sky Fell on Splendor, and Hello Girls (with Brittany Cavallaro). She has also published two fantastic romance novels Beach Read and People We Meet on Vacation. Because all of Henry's books are automatic-buys for me, stay tuned for more of my book reviews of books by Emily Henry!
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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