Title: I'll Give You the Sun
Author: Jandy Nelson
(This is an amazing book. I recommend it to everyone.)
Summary (with spoilers):
Noah and Jude, fraternal twins, are both artists. The story is told in chapters alternating between Noah's point of view at 13 to 14 and Jude's at 16. As the story unfolds, we learn how both kids find love and deal with their mother's death.
Noah paints everything in his head, and wants desperately to get into CSA, a school for the arts. However, his sister never mails his application, so he doesn't get in. Noah is in love with Brian, a baseball player who lives next door during the holidays. They start their romance, but Brian is scared that everyone will find out he is gay. Noah finds out that his mother is having an affair with the sculptor Guillermo Garcia. Upset, he sees Brian with a girl, and reveals that Brian is gay. Then he yells at his mother the night of her death. Later, he tells Guillermo that his mother wasn't going to accept his marriage proposal, even though she was.
Jude gets into CSA, but all of her clay artwork keeps breaking, which she is convinced is the doing of her mother. She decides to make a sculpture in stone, and convinces Guillermo to mentor her. All the while, she has conversations with her Grandmother's ghost and follows passages in her Grandmother's "bible," a book full of advice and superstitions. While working on her sculptor, she fails in love with Oscar Ralph, who has also seen hard times, including the death of his mother, who prophesized that he would find someone like Jude.
Jude decides to tell Noah that she is the reason he didn't get into CSA, and offers to give up her spot. She texts Noah, saying that she has something urgent to tell him. Believing that she's found out his secret, Noah plans to throw himself over one of the cliffs by the beach. Jude runs up there to save him (in the process telling off Zephyr, who she lost her virginity to the night her mother died). Noah slips out of Jude's grasp, but Oscar jumps on him and saves his life.
Soon after, all is revealed and forgiven. Guillermo realizes that Noah/Jude's mother really did love him, Noah is offered a spot at CSA, Jude and Oscar fall in love, and Brian and Noah are reunited.
My Thoughts:
This book is a symphony of color. The writing is original, descriptive, and swimming in metaphor. I loved Noah's voice, a mix of an artist's view of the world combined with a teen who is learning who he really is. His love story is so sweet, and his anguish pops off the page. Jude is so strange, fragile, and strong.
Many metaphors and themes run throughout the book. There's the idea of permanency (clay vs. stone, love vs. divorce, life vs. death) although we're given room to think about the space between these two extremes (ex. ghosts). There's the thread of guilt and forgiveness running through the book. The guilt that a character feels does not always mirror the reaction they get when they confess, like when Jude confesses to Noah that she threw away his application to CSA, and Noah isn't even angry. Of course, we have the metaphor of the sun, which is often Noah and Jude's mother. (Early on, Noah says her death would be like the sun going out, and that when his dad stepped out of the ocean, it blocked out the sun.) But I think the sun is also the buckets of light that Noah sees everywhere, especially with Brian. There's also the theme of space/largeness, like how Noah grows to take up more room than his father, and G.'s sculptures, which are so huge, and the ocean. There's the hugeness of life that overtakes everyone (especially Noah) all of the time. This only scratches the surface of the themes in this book. Truly masterful writing.
I loved how the grandmother was a character, even though she is deceased at the start of the book. It's interesting that Jude realizes the grandmother's ghost isn't real, as she admits that the ghost only knows the things that Jude knows about her grandmother.
Although the relationship between Jude and Oscar was well written, I'm not sure that it was needed. Noah's romantic story arc was so much more intense. In some ways, I feel like Jude and Oscar's relationship got in the way of the real relationship of her story, the one with her family, especially her mother.
This is the first book I read this year, but I have no doubt that it will be one of the best I read in 2015. The writing, the plotting, the characters: all of it is seriously amazing. I would recommend this book to everyone.
