Review: I’ll Give you the Sun (This was so adorable and full of emotion and I LOVED IT)

By Jandy Nelson

Rating: 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

Goodreads Rating: 4.14

Genre: YA Contemporary

Publication Date: September 16th 2014

Format Read: Kindle

Goodreads Summary: 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.

This book was AMAZINGLY BEAUTIFUL and I cannot promote it enough.  If you haven’t read it yet, you need to, because it’s one of my favorite YA books of all times, not even exaggerating.  The main concept was that Noah and Jude, twins, had to go through and live their life and deal with all of their problems of growing up.  I think Nelson did this really well, because you were super in touch with each of their emotions and you knew what they were thinking and you felt for them while you were reading their chapters.  It was beautiful.

The book was told from 2 time frames and 2 different perspectives, which made the book totally different than it could have been otherwise.  Noah’s perspective was told when he was 13-14 years old, and Jude’s perspective was told when she was 16.  A lot of shit went down in the in between years, and so it’s sort of a starting point and ending point for all of the drama of their teenage years, but yet the perspectives alternated so you never got the full story all at once.  I adored it.

 

Noah is a gay, super artistic kid whose only dream in life is getting into CSA, the super prestigious art school near his house.  I think Noah was the character you felt more sorry for throughout the novel, because he was a genuinely really really really nice kid, and most of the stuff that happened to him wasn’t really his fault.  He had a lot of trouble in school, and was RELATABLE AF for me at least because he just wanted to fit in and not be bullied and yet he couldn’t because he felt different and although our reasons are very different I just felt for him.

Jude is a totally different animal.  In Noah’s perspectives, she’s this super popular flirtatious girly girl who fights with her mom and brother.  In her perspective, she has become a reclusive, hidden potato of a child on a BOYcott (she’s not dating or flirting with boys).  So obviously something big happened to her, and that makes you want to know more and figure her out.  But tbh she wasn’t the nicest person in the world, although I still loved her.

Oscar and Brian.  The love interests.  Oscar was Jude’s redeeming feature, because you SHIP THEM SO HARD.  They are perfect and I adore it.  Brian and Noah I ship too obviously and I think the whole thing is adorable aaagghghhh cannot compute.  The romance level of this book was so on point because there was no insta-love and yet there was no fighting, bad boy cliche act either.  It was just real.

The plot of this story was mainly driven by relationships (mostly family) especially NoahandJude vs. Noah and Jude and the way which those dynamics played in.  This really worked for me because I’m very character based, so if you like contemporary I think this would work out really well for you.  I can’t think of much else to say.

Guillermo (I forgot to mention him in characters) is the most mysteriously incredible mentor ever.

ART!! I want to art so badly after reading this book

Unique perspective.  Jude and Noah have such different voices that Nelson captured perfectly.

The whole book

romance

beautifulness

the whole book (did I say that already?)

 

Jude, maybe? Their mom, maybe? Life and what it does to them, maybe?  but not the book, at all.

 

Noah is gay! and he’s not gay like trying to find his identity, and the whole book is not just about his gayness, which makes it more honest and real and awesome.

cheating, attempted suicide, depression

READ THIS BOOK PLEASE OH PLEASE GODS.  I loved it so much and will forever recommend it to everyone until the day that I die.

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Have you read this book? Have you read anything else by this author? What did you think? Which characters did you love and which did you hate?  Do you have any other book recs that you think I would love just as much as this one?

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