Book Review: I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson

I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson

(Goodreads)

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.

Sometimes it's hard to gather my thoughts when I feel like I've been thrown into a hurricane, spun around a couple thousand times, and spat out in the span of three seconds. That's more or less the equivalent of reading this ~400 page book in three days.

I seem to be on a roll reading books that alternate chapters between either characters or time periods (Beside Myself, Finding Amelia, Hide). I'll Give You the Sun actually gave me both! Noah tells the past and Jude tells the present and in every chapter you find out a little bit of what happens in between. One thing that I loved and hated at the same time was how long each chapter was. I could feel myself getting so immersed into the story when the chapter would end at what seemed like the best part. I definitely had a lot of urges to skip the next chapter (mostly Jude's) so I could peek at what was next.

Jude and Noah are some of the best siblings I've read in a while. And it's not because they're perfect, or anywhere near that at all. Jude and Noah show the ugly side of sibling jealousy; the backstabbing, the lies, the ugly tendencies you can't hide. Their luggage of flaws definitely made them feel real and relatable.

Noah, without a doubt, made me feel like I was in high school, falling in love for the first time. Jandy Nelson did an amazing job at capturing those fluttering feelings that honestly, made my heart skip a couple of beats. His unique way of seeing the world definitely captured the mind of a young artist who can't stop thinking about what to create next.

Jude took a while to grow on me. Like Noah, she's artistic but in a non-obvious way. And to be quite honest, she's a bit of a mess when we first meet her. It was hard to not to groan at how much of a teenager she was being and it isn't until later that I could really understand why she was being like that. However, it's incredibly beautiful to see her unique way of coping with her circumstances (spoiler alert: her mother's death).

Without a doubt, I'd read this book again (and I'm looking forward to the film adaptation, can they please get Antonio Banderas to play G?). There's nothing extraordinary that happens, but the writing magnifies it in a way that makes you feel like you're reading something remarkable.

Memorable Quotes 

Noah

"It's like being kissed by a feather, no, smoother, a petal. Too soft. We're petal people. I think about the earthquake kiss in the alcove and want to cry again. This time because I am sad. And scared. And because my skin has never fit this badly before." (134) 

Jude

"I kept thinking, it's okay, I can handle this. I can. It's okay, okay, okay. But it wasn't and I couldn't. I didn't know you could get buried in your own silence." (47)