The Love That Split The World

by Emily Henry

Rating

5 stars!!!

Date Read

4/4/16 - 10/4/16

Age Group

15+

General Thoughts

I came into The Love That Split The World expecting a chicky love story, an easy, quick fun read. Instead I was treated with a masterpiece on time and love, and a love that transcends all time, and brain freezing notions on relativity, alternate realities and the wormholes.

Buffalo and unlit hallways, mysterious boys on the football field, and Grandmother’s stories. A warning and a ticking clock. A painful hollow in my stomach. What is she trying to tell me?

Main Characters

Natalie

Hypnopompic reach forward, and hypnagogic reach back.

Natalie is the adopted Native American child of a nuclear, all-white American family that loves her dearly. She is very sensitive and feels deeply, be it joy, pain or panic. Yet she has trouble knowing herself and so she's constantly battling in search of her identity, giving up dancing, popularity and her golden boyfriend in her attempts to find who she is, her 

Natalie

Sane is not a word that should used to describe her. In addition to her strong, at times uncontrollable emotions, she's suffering from hypnopompic hallucinations as a result of an old trauma and thanks to those hallucinations she is visited by an ancient, wrinkly woman that tells her stories about the beginning of the world.

The book begins as Grandmother visits Natalie for the last time, repeating to her the first creation story she ever told her..

"You have three months to save him!" She then insists cryptically before disappearing into the void.

And so Grandmother leaves the seventeen year old Natalie Cleary, at the beginning of the bittersweet summer before college, having given her a deadline to solve the mystery of time.

Beau

It is shortly after she's been paid her last visit from Grandmother that things start to go awfully wrong for Natalie: The door of her house flashes red instead of its usual green, her school disappears for whole minutes, giving way to rolling hills. And a bear-sized, beautiful teenaged boy appears to fade in and out of existence in the football pitch.

Beau Wilkes is gentle, handsome, muscled, dark haired, with serious brown eyes, a shy smile and an adorable accent and he can make the piano sing in a way that hands as big as his shouldn't have been able to.

He also doesn't exist in her world.

Their realities are different, and slipping between the two worlds is getting more and more different as the weeks pass, even while their bond is only getting stronger.

A paradox, is it not, to be in love with someone you should never have met, who does not exist in your timeline, who lives in a different world in which you're absent, just like he is from yours?

And yet their realities are not so different after all, and all their other friends exist, with subtle differences, in both worlds. All except them...

Beau

TEASERS

Nat about Beau (To prove just how beautiful their romance is):

“What does he look like?” Meghan asks. “Well, his biceps are roughly the size of my head, and his eyes look like summer incarnate, and he has two little dark freckles on the side of his nose, and a mouth that somehow manages to look like a shy kid’s one minute and a virile Greek god’s the next. So I guess you could say, pretty decent.”

"Being around people is exhausting. Being around Beau is like a really good version of being alone, as easy but more fun" 

"I don't believe in love at first sight but maybe this is as close as it gets: seeing someone, a person you have no business loving, on a football field one night and thinking, I want you to be mine and I want to be yours."

"He sounds like July" 

“He does make me feel warm,” I say. “And safe. He’s . . . even. I doubt I could ever shock him. And he knows about Grandmother and the two worlds, and that makes me feel understood. Like, less alone than I’ve ever been. Like we’re somehow two parts of the same thing.”

Right the someone could’ve told me he was the one who spread out the stars and I would have been neither surprised nor any more impressed than I already was.

Nat & Beau

"I should’ve known you were just distracting me.” “The oldest trick in the book,” I say. “The one where the other team makes you think you’re about to make out,” he agrees. “Usually doesn’t work quite that well.”

His eyes rove over me. “You’re here right now.” “Yeah,” I say, because I had a vision of you might come off a little too strong.

Meghan

So, I've read about all kinds of best friends and Meghan is definitely one of the best. She is not just the "loyal and fun BFF that the protagonist tunes out when things get hard" kind of girl. She's much more than that... She is a believer, a strong, smart woman, a funny girl and a good friend.

She is quite the opposite of Natalie, and their characters are sort of complementary. Meghan listens and supports and worries for her friend, gives good advise, and some of their conversations are probably the most hilarious exchanges between BFFs.

“Good news or bad news first?” Megan says. “Bad news,” I croak. “Okay, well, that’s the wrong order, and the good news is:

“He invited me over.”I say “In what way?” “There are multiple ways someone can come over?” “So many ways,” Megan assures me.

"Honestly, Meg, if I needed you, I would've found you, mid-cheese-powder make-out or not."

Writing Narrating

Gorgeous in both accounts. Natalie's voice is easy to relate to as she 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. She looks forward to leaving for her Ivy League college and starting her life, even as she struggles with the inevitable changes that come with her eighteenth summer (with her best friend Megan leaving for Georgetown, her friends scattering, her first love Matt growing estranged from her).

The creation stories from all around the world are not just clever fairy tales, but add to and support the backdrop, subtly unveiling important notions many chapters before they actually become clear in the book. 

All the theories on time and space are at least thought provoking, whispering about how little we can actually know about perception in our three dimensional false realities.

"No story is truer than any other story that has the truth in its heart" - Grandmother

Plot/Characters

The plot is fast paced and full of surprising twists, the building tension practically palpable as it all leads up to those final chapters, where everything finally makes sense.

The characters are fleshed out and alive, human and relatable, from Natalie's panic attacks to Beau's sad eyes, to Meghan's enthusiasm and Coco's collected manners.

The romance is so gentle and heartachingly beautiful, and it blossoms unforcefully on its own, through clever flirting, shy smiles and long conversations.

All in All

Just go read it! Especially perfect for ages 16-18, an emotional roller coaster with strong characters, interesting ideas, excellent plot thickening and a devastating love that just might split the world. This book reminded me why I love reading!

"It's about the cost of love. To grow up is to love. To love is to die. Who is going to die?"

PS. Songs

Jason Mraz - Yours (First few chapters)

Cardigans - You're The Storm (Natalie)

Foxes - Cruel (Dancing in the studio)

Years & Years - Shine (Last few chapters)

XOXO

Aggie Pearson