I’ll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson
Release Date: 16 September 2014
Source: ARC (via On The Same Page)
Order: Amazon || Powell’s
In a nutshell: Twin teenagers Noah and Jude used to be inseparable, but a series of events drive them apart. Each sibling only has half the story, though, and they need to find their way back to each other to put things back together.
We Judge Covers: This cover tells you very little about the book, but it’s super fun. Definitely something I’d at least pick up in the book store, knowing nothing else about it. A+ work, marketing folks.
Main Character: There are two, though I think Jude got a little more time than Noah. The story jumps a little in the timeline – Noah begins the story when they’re 13 and Jude begins when they’re 16. The narration jumps back and forth but the two stay in their respective timelines. On the whole, I loved these two. They’re insecure and full of angsty feelings. They love each other and their families fiercely but they do a lot of stupid shit out of insecurity/jealousy/immaturity. Still, I always felt like I understood the place that their bad choices were coming from. The way that the world treats them and the way that they internalize their assumptions of the way they are seen strongly shapes them, because teenagers. When they are being open and honest with each other, they’re able to draw strength from that unconditional love, but when they shut it each other out it weakens them all around. I loved that dynamic.
I did have a little bit of a problem with Noah’s voice at the outset – he felt a little older than 13 to me. I got over that pretty quickly, not so much because it stopped feeling true as because it was a minor quibble and I could see how aging his voice a tiny bit enhanced the story.
The other issue that I had – and this one bothered me a lot more – was that both characters did too much telling. Scenes with dialogue were heavily broken up with inner monologue. Jude, in particular, got frustrating with that inner monologue because she would ask an inane series of questions. Is he saying that because of [insert reason he’s clearly saying that]? Or is he saying that because [insert insecurity-driven explanation]? The excessive questioning in the inner monologue is something that often irks me in narration, but it’s frustrating when it’s used as a crutch like this, as if the author’s afraid the reader can’t deduce any of these character motivations unless her protagonist plays 20 questions in her mind in between each line of dialogue. (Plus, there’s no way you’re paying attention to a conversation when you stop to ask yourself all those questions between each sentence!)
Those issues aside, I truly did love Noah and Jude.
Love Interest: I’m not sure what to reveal about Noah’s big love interest, except that I liked him a whole lot more than Jude’s. Oscar (Jude’s love interest) is easily the weakest thing about this story. I have sprained a muscle in my eye from all the eye rolling I did because this kid is a giant YA cliche. I kept waiting for it turn into some sort of satircal meta commentary or something, but it did not. Jude’s very first observation about Oscar is that he has “a crooked smile” and things don’t get much better from there. There’s more I could say, but spoilers. Suffice it to say that this is Thing #1 that I think I wish I could fix about this story.
Negligent Parents? Not really. Definitely not in the “traditional” sense of this concept, wherein supposedly decent parents are mysteriously absent in order to facilitate plot. The parents are two of the more significant supporting characters, which I also liked. There are times where they are rather negligent but there’s also an interesting dynamic where Noah and Jude gradually come to understand their parents better as they get older. Realizing that their parents are complicated individuals is a huge part of “coming of age” and this novel does a fantastic job of handling that. My heart hurt for everyone throughout. (Most of the time, I mean, sometimes people just do shitty things and one person is clearly in the wrong. That’s life sometimes, too.)
1430: The family dynamics. Regular readers of this blog will know what a helpless sucker I am for sibling feels and the current driving this entire story is the relationship between Noah and Jude. They spent most of the novel breaking my heart in ways that (typically) rang true, if painfully. On top of that, this book had the relationships between the twins and their parents and their grandmother – all of which were wonderfully handled.
#MEH: The Jude/Oscar relationship. All of it.
The End: Far too tidy. When Twitter exploded with disgruntled reactions to the conclusion of another series I never finished, John Green said something along the lines of, “Books aren’t in the business of wish fulfillment.” The thing is that they can be. They just tend to become weaker for it and that’s the case here. There were so many different threads here that all presto! magic! came together perfectly in the end. To be clear, I’m not saying it shouldn’t have had a happy ending, but this is above and beyond just giving things a happy ending. This story dedicates a lot of time and space to talking about how our cracks and breaks are part of who we are as people. It was a bit insulting to the rest of that story to insist on this excessively picture-perfect ending.
Away Message Worthy Quote: “Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story.”
For Traumateers who: Love sibling feels and broody bad boy love interests.
Final Grade: B+
Nicole is the co-captain of Snark Squad and these days she spends most of her time editing podcasts. She spends too much time on Twitter and very occasionally vlogs and blogs. In her day job she's a producer, editor, director, and sometimes host of educational YouTube channels. She loves travel, maps, panda gifs, and semicolons. Writing biographies stresses her out; she crowd sourced this one years ago and has been using a version of it ever since. She would like to thank Twitter for their help.
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