The Love That Split the World by Emily Henry Book Review

  

The Love That Split the World by Emily Henry Book Review 

The Love That Split The World by Emily Henry is such a difficult book to summarize, but my summary of it is that our main character Natalie is from a very small Kentucky hometown. Very Southern, and very into football. 

She just graduated from high school and all throughout high school she dated the popular football "It guy" on and off and they've kind of had a rocky relationship. She used to be on the dance team and she's quit. 

She's just kind of decided she is over high school and she is ready to move out and go off to college and learn about herself and she is done with this town and with these friends.

So there is this big theme of growing up and moving on, especially in relation to friendships and relationships. And Natalie, her whole life, has had these visitations by an old woman who appears in her bedroom at night. All the adults think that Natalie is hallucinating or has some kind of stress disorder, but Natalie is convinced that this woman is real.

Natalie has gone to therapy, gotten over it, and hasn't seen this old woman in her room at night in years. But then all of a sudden one night, the old woman is in her room again and she says "Natalie, you've got 3 months to save him."

But she doesn't say who "he" is. All of her life, when the old woman has visited Natalie, the woman has told her these traditional Native American folktales and apparently the key to saving "him" - whoever he is - lies within these folktales.

But now all of a sudden after this ominous warning, Natalie starts seeing another person - a guy that she's never seen in her town before starts appearing in random places. What is happening here? This is the question.

I want to start out by talking about the things that I liked and the things I think that a lot of readers will connect with a lot better than I did.

First of all, the writing is very atmospheric. It really captured that small-town feel for me, and also just that antsiness of wanting to grow up and move on. It also captured really great feelings concerning first love and friendships, especially friendships that you know you're going to have to leave behind, and just dealing with the emotions and thought processes behind it - like what's going to happen when I go off to college and I'm not with my friends all the time? Or, what's going to happen after first love? Is there another chance for (second) love, and can I still look back fondly on that first love?

In addition, I really loved that the main character was a diverse main character. She is Native American who has been adopted into a white family and her parents have biological children as well, so there's this constant questioning of who she is, what are her roots, and just that feeling of searching for who you are in a primarily white society. 

I know I can't speak on that too well, but I thought that that was one of the strengths of this book for me. It gave me a new perspective and I did enjoy that about the book.

I also really enjoyed the friendship between Natalie and her friend Meg. Their dialogue, and their banter, and their texts back and forth - they're good friends and I really liked that. I think that you will enjoy that friendship.

This book does have a lot of beautiful quotes about a ton of different things: first love, friendship, growing up, moving on, discovering who you are. There are a lot of really powerful quotes here so if any of these topics connect with you, I think that you will really really like this story.

And some of these things did connect with me, but moving into what I didn't like about this book and why it didn't work for me, I felt like this book was trying to do too much. 

It was kind of like a life lesson on so many different aspects of being a teenager and growing up that it was like everything and the kitchen sink, I'm just going to shove it into this book! I felt like because it was trying to do so many things it kind of took away from the importance of any ONE thing. If that makes sense.

Two brief things I want to talk about that I didn't like about this book were the Instalove and the Love Triangle. Now, I didn't feel that the love triangle needed to be there at all, in any way. 

We've got Natalie's ex-boyfriend, and then this mysterious guy. And she's getting over all her feelings for the ex and moving on and what first love means, and then she's got this new guy and I just feel like one or the other of these could have been totally absent from the story and it would have still been the same story, just cut in half.

It really felt like two different stories were going on here and that they didn't flow together as seamlessly as perhaps they should have. In terms of the installed with the new guy Beau, I really liked the romance between Natalie and Beau. I didn't dislike it at all. But it didn't convince me of why they felt so strongly in such a short amount of time.

Moving into the bigger reasons why I didn't like this book and why it didn't work for me - the Goodreads page says this is like 'Friday Night Lights' meets 'The Time Traveler's Wife.' Yes, there is time travel in this book, but it wasn't really the type of time travel that I needed as a reader.

I feel like if you look back at some of my more recent reviews, anyone could really quickly assume that I need a lot of action and a lot of plot from page one. And to an extent, yeah, I prefer plot-driven stories, but I like a good character-driven story too and that definitely was what this book was. 

If you want to know every single thing about a character's life from the day she was born, every dream she's ever had, every memory she's ever had, everything about every single character in this book, this is going to be a really good atmospheric story for you to get into. That is not what I was expecting when I heard the words "time traveller."

I was expecting a bit more.. ooomph, and action and a bit more of a fast-paced story. But for me, the pacing of the plot was just problematic. It was too slow for me. Too slow of a build. I knew that she was a time traveller. I knew that from the start of the book, from the synopsis, the way that the book was marketed. 

I knew Natalie was slipping through time and so Natalie didn't know that and I felt it was very obvious and then every time she would actually make some kind of action toward figuring out what was going on, the book would just stop and say 'Here's another folktale!' I loved the folktales, don't get me wrong, they were one of my favourite parts of the book, but they really broke up the pace.

Or when you'd get back into the pace it was like 'Let's spend 5 pages on a therapy session!' There were multiple therapy sessions throughout the book when Natalie meets with a therapist and we just get these massive infodumps about different therapy techniques for memories and dreams, which aren't even what's really going on here. 

And then at the end when they finally are like 'Hey, we know what's happening!', let's stop and instead of figuring out what happened, let's explain all of the theories of time travel that could possibly be happening here. And it was something that I already knew because I've seen 'Back To The Future.' I've watched time travel movies and read time travel books and I didn't need it spelled out with my hand being held the whole time.

I felt like the plot kept going and then would stop. We had to wait until this infodump passed. And then it would go again. And stop. And then go again. And then stop. 

So I feel like if you picked this book up because you wanted that time travel story, you could read chapter 1 and then skip to chapter 31 and that's it. The middle part is like small-town kids going out and getting drunk, partying, kissing each other, and making out. And then sometimes Natalie sees a person that's not supposed to be there. And not until chapter 31 do we actually get anything... happening.

I used an analogy in my Goodreads written review that I will reiterate here: The reading experience of this book was like getting on a bus. And this bus was advertised as 'this bus will take you home.' And I'm like 'Ok, cool. 

I want to go home. I'm going to get on this bus!' And the bus keeps making all these unexpected stops. Every time you get going and you're like 'yes! I'm that much closer to home!' the bus would stop and turn and do something else. 

And then finally you're like 'Oh, ok, this bus isn't taking me home, it's taking me to Grandma's house. That's cool, I can go visit Grandma right now. I'm down with that.' And then you get to Grandma's house and as soon as this bus stops to let you off... all of a sudden you wake up in Canada in a gas station with no clothes on, no phone, no money! And you have NO IDEA how you got there! Why am I here? This is not what I signed up for.

I also just really didn't like the ending. I liked nothing about the ending. I thought that it was pretty obvious and I think that some of the character motivations were completely selfish. And... I... mm mm (shakes head). And then there's this whole other plot line with the ex, Matt, that doesn't even come to mean anything. It just felt like overall this book was a mess. It tried to shove so much stuff in there that I couldn't focus on any one thread at any given time.

And you easily could have cut out Beau completely, Beau and the time travel could have been gone and this would have been a really sweet story about growing up and leaving high school, moving on from a first love. 

That could have been a story in and of itself. Or you could have cut out the character of Matt, the first love, altogether and had it focus more on the time travel stuff. But as it was, I felt like this story didn't really know what genre it was supposed to be.

Like I said, I definitely think that other readers are going to like it. That's what 2 stars mean to me: I didn't like it but I still find value and merit in this story. So it's not that I wouldn't recommend it, but I just wanted to let you guys know WHY it didn't work for me, and I'm definitely not trying to talk you out of reading this book if it sounds like something you're interested in.

If you've read this book I definitely would like to hear from you what you thought about it. I hope you liked it better than I did. And if you want to talk about any spoilers with me we can definitely do so down in the comments below. 

I have so many different thoughts on the ending and if you want to hear those I definitely am up for talking about them, I just didn't want to alienate anybody with a spoiler review.

But I can definitely discuss those more in-depth. If you have any other questions about this book that I didn't cover please let me know down in the comments and I will answer you there.

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