REVIEW and GIVEAWAY
Eight Days on Planet Earth
by Cat Jordan
Eight Days on Planet Earth by Cat Jordan is due for release on 7 November but is currently available for pre-order. This book is currently on tour with YA Bound Book Tours. The tour stops here today for my review, a guest post by the author, and a giveaway. Please be sure to visit the other tour stops as well.
Description
A heart-wrenching romance full of twists that are sure to bring tears to readers’ eyes, from Cat Jordan, author of The Leaving Season.
How long does it take to travel twenty light years to Earth?
How long does it take to fall in love?
To the universe, eight days is a mere blip, but to Matty Jones, it may be just enough time to change his life.
On the hot summer day Matty’s dad leaves for good, a strange girl suddenly appears in the empty field next to the Jones farm - the very field in rural Pennsylvania where a spaceship supposedly landed fifty years ago. She is uniquely beautiful, sweet, and smart, and she tells Matty she’s waiting for her spaceship to pick her up and return her to her home planet. Of course she is.
Matty has heard a million impossible UFO stories for each of his seventeen years: the conspiracy theories, the wild rumors, the crazy belief in life beyond the stars. When he was a kid, he and his dad searched the skies and studied the constellations. But all of that is behind him. Dad’s gone - but now there’s Priya. She must be crazy ... right?
As Matty unravels the mystery of the girl in the field, he realizes there is far more to her than he first imagined. And if he can learn to believe in what he can’t see: the universe, aliens ... love ... then maybe the impossible is possible, after all.
Praise for the Book
"A wonderfully readable, ultimately hopeful, and life-affirming story that will be enjoyed by fans of Nicola Yoon’s The Sun Is Also a Star and Gae Polisner’s The Memory of Things." ~ School Library Journal
"This is such a great book. I recommend it to fans of contemporary romance and anything space-related. It's magical. It's sad. It's beautiful. You'll love it." ~ Chloe (Blushing Bibliophile)
"Eight Days on Planet Earth is a down-to-earth yet otherworldly novel - magical, funny, and a little heartbreaking." ~ Madison
"Loved it! Such a great ending. A lot of surprising twists, but I felt all of the scenes were loyal to the plot. There wasn't a single thing I didn't love about it, which is rare for me. So great!" ~ Avery
"It's a sweet book, with a heart-tugging resolution that fans of YA will really enjoy." ~ Veronica of V's Reads
My Review
By Lynda Dickson
The book recounts the events that transpire over the course of an eight day period. Matty is on summer break before his final year of high school, and he plans to just hang around the lake with his friends. However, he wakes up to find that his father, a conspiracy theorist and UFO blogger, has left his family. Also on that day, Matty meets Priya, a strange girl who claims to be waiting for a ride back to her planet, which is 20 light years away. She sets up camp in the field near Matty's house, where a spaceship is said to have landed at the same moment that his father was born. Because of his father's interest in astronomy and aliens, Matty has developed a healthy skepticism about all things alien. But, over the course of the next few days, he finds himself slowly believing. And as he learns to see his world the way Priya sees it, he learns to appreciate what he has. But is Priya really an alien or is just plain crazy? Or is the truth something else entirely?
The author does a great job getting inside the head of Matty, the seventeen-year-old male narrator. I love Matty's relationship with his mother and his interactions with Priya. I also love Priya's description of the sensation of eating pizza. This book is cute, funny, and sad, all at the same time.
Compulsively readable.
Warnings: coarse language, sexual references, sex scenes (not graphic), alcohol abuse (by adults), infidelity.
Some of My Favorite Lines
"She’s so far out of Brian’s league, she might as well be on another planet."
"Sounds like a path to loserdom. Like father, like son."
"Grease eases a lot of pain."
"Her eyes are wide open, staring straight up at the sky as if she were drinking it in, drowning in the moon and stars."
"I’m pretty sure she was lying about not having a phone. Is there anyone on this planet who doesn’t own a cell?"
"Makes me wish I could stick a jump drive into my ear and suck out all the useless information. Maybe then I’d have room for English lit."
"I have to harden my heart to her. I have to or else I will die a little more every day that we’re together."
"We all just want to be home, don’t we?"
"He told me to look to the skies. We were like the stars that glittered and glowed. We could find ourselves among them if we just looked hard enough. We could do great things. We could make a difference. We could be special."
"Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean you can’t believe in it."
Guest Post by the Author
The Real Space Field
The spaceship landing in Kecksburg , Pennsylvania
In this case, I researched UFO sightings and from there, alleged UFO landings in the United States
When I stumbled upon the one in Kecksburg, I found that there wasn’t a tremendous amount of information about it, which, for a fiction writer, is a good thing. A little bit of truth is good but we want to feel free to make up the rest.
Just like in my novel, the event in Kecksburg happened in December of 1965, and not long after, the military rolled into town, sealed off the area, and rolled out back out of town with the supposed spaceship. Kecksburg at the time was, like Matty’s town, small and rural. Naturally, since this was the 60s, there was no internet to quickly disseminate the cover-up nor were there iPhones to snap photos and video of the military operation. Cameras and film were confiscated and no evidence was left behind.
And, like in my book, there were various cultural references to it over the years including a few episodes of some television shows like The Discovery Channel’s 2008 documentary series, Nazi UFO Conspiracy, and The History Channel’s 2009 episode of UFO Hunters.
But I thought it would be more interesting if all of this happened before Matty was born, so it was legend to him, stuff that his father would have explained to him as he was growing up and they were studying the stars together. It would become just as natural to Matty as other kids’ stories about their heritage, about their family, and their hometown.
The one similarity between the two incidents that I wanted to maintain was the effect the UFO landing had on one person in each of the towns. In the case of Kecksburg, that man was John Murphy, a local radio journalist who was one of the first people to arrive at the crash site. He interviewed many residents of the town and the event profoundly affected him. He wrote a radio documentary called Object in the Woods, but it never aired as written because two "men in black" came to talk to him. The version that aired did not include many of the statements from the people he interviewed nor did it reveal anything surprising. According to former colleagues at the radio station, Murphy refused to talk about the UFO incident after the airing of the edited documentary. He died in a hit-and-run accident a few years later.
I took inspiration from John Murphy when I created Matty’s father, DJ Jones. While he wasn’t despondent and depressed like Murphy, he was obsessed with the UFO incident and convinced there was a cover-up. However, I wanted DJ to ultimately be an optimistic man, one who believed that life beyond the stars was real.
About the Author
When I was a teenager, the very first book I ever tried to write was pretentious and stilted and set in a future where there was no paper. Obviously, I fancied myself another Ray Bradbury (who I was thrilled to meet not once but twice!). The book had an awesome title and no plot but I had the most fun creating the characters and the world they lived in. That to me is the most enjoyable part of writing a novel: envisioning a world and populating it with all kinds of people and dogs. Gotta have a dog.
The worlds I create now as an adult are based on my travels from coast to coast in the US, to Europe and Mexico and Canada, and on the people I have met and loved and admired and feared. And dogs.
Currently I live in Los Angeles. With my dog.
Giveaway
Enter the tour-wide giveaway for a chance to win one of three Amazon gift cards or one of two signed copies of Eight Days on Planet Earth by Cat Jordan (US only).
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