“Does Anybody Have a Map” to the nearest Book Store?

“Even when the dark comes crashing through/ When you need a friend to carry you/ When you’re broken on the ground/ You will be found”

-You Will Be Found (Dear Evan Hansen)

Attention musical theater loving bookworms! This past week, the 2016 hit musical “Dear Evan Hansen” became a novel.

But the novel almost didn’t happen. When author Val Emmich’s agent called about the project, his initial response was to turn the project down.

“I realized how big of a phenomenon it was, and that scared me off,” Emmich said in an article for the New York Times.

Seeing the show scared him off even more.

“I thought, oh man, this is so beloved, I can only screw this up,” Emmich said in the same article.

In the end, after meeting with Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the show’s songwriters along with Steven Levenson, who wrote the book for the show, Emmich took the job. The book was completed in six months.

It’s very rare that a musical become a book. The last Broadway show to go from stage to page was the 1957 show Broadway show West Side Story. Many musicals, such as The Color Purple, were already books.

Unlike a lot of original musicals, Dear Evan Hansen lends itself more readily to a novel since much of the story revolves around Evan’s inner conflict. The novel also fleshes out more of the details that audiences don’t see in the stage production, like the stuff about Evan’s father.

“Whenever I was unsure of what was going on beneath the surface of a character’s emotions, I could always put on the music,” said Emmich.

Since the novel’s release, it has made the New York Times best sellers list as well as some other lists. You can buy it wherever books are sold.