About The Girl Who Chased the Moon

We’re so excited to be featuring Sarah Addison Allen and her new release, The Girl Who Chased the Moon, this week on Books on the House!

A bit about The Girl Who Chased the Moon, by Sarah Addison Allen.

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“How tall is he?” she asked, her voice hushed, as if he might hear.
“Tall enough to see into tomorrow.”–Chapter Two, The Girl Who Chased the Moon

Every book I’ve written has had some element of fairytale to it. The sentient apple tree in . The Rapunzel references in . And The Girl Who Chased the Moon is no different. I actually ended up with a giant in this story.

I remember when I first wrote elderly Vance Shelby into The Girl Who Chased the Moon. He walked into a room and had to duck under the doorframe. I knew then that this was no ordinary man. This was a giant. But how tall was too tall? When would real become unreal? It’s a fine line. I began to research gigantism and discovered the tallest man in history for whom there is irrefutable medical proof: Robert Pershing Wadlow, the Giant of Illinois. At the time of his death at the young age of 22, Wadlow was almost nine feet tall. It’s a stunning number, isn’t it? Nine feet tall. I pored over old film and audio interviews from the 1930s, trying to get a feel for what his life was like, so I could present with veracity this magically tall man in my story. What I discovered was a soft-spoken gentle giant whose legs were so long he walked like he was on stilts, whose body listed to the side like a skyscraper made of soft wood instead of concrete. But he was always smiling, accepting the stares and the requests for photos good-naturedly as he toured with Ringling Brothers and the International Shoe Company. He never hid himself away. He mingled among regular-sized people like he knew he had to savor every moment. And maybe he did know. Maybe he was tall enough to see into tomorrow.

In honor of Wadlow, I took all that I thought a young giant might wish for–a long life, a wife, a family, a place that accepted him as he was, where he was just another town oddity–and I gave it to elderly Vance Shelby in The Girl Who Chased the Moon. And as an old giant, Vance looks back on a life he always wanted to be extraordinarily small, and finds that it was exactly the size it needed to be. Which I think might be truth for us all. –Sarah Addison Allen