I'll Give You the Sun

I'll Give You the Sun

Jandy Nelson

Genre: Young Adult Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads): A brilliant, luminous story of first love, family, loss, and betrayal for fans of John Green, David Levithan, and Rainbow Rowell

Jude and her twin brother, Noah, are incredibly close. At thirteen, isolated Noah draws constantly and is falling in love with the charismatic boy next door, while daredevil Jude cliff-dives and wears red-red lipstick and does the talking for both of them. But three years later, Jude and Noah are barely speaking. Something has happened to wreck the twins in different and dramatic ways . . until Jude meets a cocky, broken, beautiful boy, as well as someone else—an even more unpredictable new force in her life. The early years are Noah's story to tell. The later years are Jude's. What the twins don't realize is that they each have only half the story, and if they could just find their way back to one another, they’d have a chance to remake their world.

This radiant novel from the acclaimed, award-winning author of The Sky Is Everywhere will leave you breathless and teary and laughing—often all at once.

Review:  This is another young adult book that I just loved.  I have to admit that Jude and especially Noah seemed too artistically minded to be realistic, but then again I'm not an artist, so maybe that is an accurate portrayal of how artists see the world.  Do they really say things like "purple starbursts were shooting from his hands while his head glowed gold in the mist of the cerulean forest"?  I made up this quote because I returned the book, so I can't quote accurately, but this is what Noah sounded like all the time.  It drove me nuts in the beginning of the book, but as I kept reading, I got used to his colorful way of using metaphors as part of the artistic quirkiness of his character.

Flowery artistic metaphors aside, I loved just about everything in this book.  The dual narrator and dual timeline worked well in this story, although I always found myself wanting to continue with the current story instead of jumping to the next narrator at the end of a chapter.  That's just a sign of how invested I was in that narrator's story....  I loved how devoted Jude and Noah were too each other; I loved how their relationship with their mother and father were so complicated and changeable; I loved how both of them were trying to handle their romances; I loved how both of them learned to be true to themselves.  The publisher got it right when they recommended this book for fans of John Green and Rainbow Rowell; it compares positively with books written by those authors.

Rating: 5 stars