Book Review: The Love That Split The World

Synopsis from Amazon:

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.

I didn’t love this book like I thought I would. I almost didn’t finish it but after I finished reading Maybe Someday I returned to it at the advise of many people on Instagram. However, it’d be wrong to say this is a bad novel. It’s not. Emily Henry crafted a well-written and thought provoking novel. It just wasn’t the book for me.

Throughout most of her life Natalie has received visits from a mysterious woman she refers to as “Grandmother.” One night during Natalie’s senior years of high school “Grandmother” warns Natalie that she only has three months to save “him” but of course, “Grandmother” doesn’t explain who the “him” she’s referring to is.

Enter Beau, an equally mysterious character that suddenly appears in Natalie’s life. And I mean that literally. He just pops up on the football field and Natalie’s the only one that sees him. Soon Natalie’s life is getting more and more strange. She’s seeing things that aren’t really there and what she thought was there one moment suddenly disappears. Beau seems to be the key to all of Natalie’s problems but she’s not sure exactly how everything’s connected and Natalie believes she must find “Grandmother” to get answers.

Unfortunately, after “Grandmother” gave Natalie the warning she didn’t come back. But with the support of her best friend who believes “Grandmother” is some version of God, and the help of a mysterious woman “Grandmother” tells Natalie to find, Natalie may be able to finally figure out the truth. But will she be too late to save someone’s life?

The cloud of mystery surrounding this novel was way too much for me. And I wasn’t at all interested in “Grandmother’s” stories and kept skimming through them even though I knew they were important to the book as a whole. I just couldn’t care enough to read them. I was bored. My favorite scenes were when Natalie was with Beau or talking to her best friends.

I think The Love That Splits The World falls into the magical realism category and I now know I don’t like this type of book. I didn’t like all the theoretical aspects of this book and although I think Henry did a great job of explaining why Natalie and Beau were the way they were in the end, a part of me just wished it wasn’t so complicated.

Like I said, I really wanted to like this book. I just couldn’t get into it. However, I can see why other people loved it. This one just wasn’t for me.

Borrow or Buy: Borrow.

Stars: