Eight Days on Planet Earth by Cat Jordan

by Cat Jordan

Eight Days on Planet Earth
by Cat Jordan
Genre: YA Contemporary Fiction
Release date: November 7th 2017
HarperTeen

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 herspaceship 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.

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Note from Cat Jordan: I don’t write to music. I can’t! I don’t know how other writers do it. First of all, I love to dance so if it’s a song that makes me want to move, I’m going to get up and do that instead of keeping my derriere in the chair. And second, if I hear lyrics I’ll want to sing along and then I’ll probably forget a word or two which means I will have go to Google to look up lyrics and then…next thing you know, I’m YouTubeing all the versions of Faith by George Michael and going to the Wiki page of the song to research what each line means and discovering how wrong I was and then…well, the whole day is gone and I haven’t written anything!

So in putting together this playlist, I thought more about my characters, about Matty and Priya, and even about their friends Brian and his sister Emily. What songs speak to their individual personalities and describe what they are all about?

For Matty, it’s about the concrete, what we can see and touch:

Space Oddity by David Bowie

Rocket Man by Elton John

Time by Pink Floyd

For Priya, a bit more ethereal

Across the Universe by the Beatles

Faith by Stevie Wonder w/Ariana Grande

Believe by Mumford & Sons

For Brian, it was more of a feeling:

Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz

Sugar Magnolia by the Grateful Dead

You Don’t Know How It Feels by Tom Petty

For Emily, it was the music I know she secretly listened to:

Believer by Imagine Dragons

One by U2

Love Interruption by Jack White

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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.