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Hey guys, this week I decided to dive a little deeper into our Book of the Month. It was a book that really struck me and I felt it deserved a little more than a small blurb, so here is my full rundown including a synopsis and observations. Warning: Spoiler alerts! (Although I try not to spoil too much!) Enjoy!
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“Embrace the mystery,” author Jandy Nelson writes in her second young adult novel, I’ll Give You the Sun. And embrace the mystery it certainly does, with lots of unexpected plot twists and foreshadowing just within the first few pages. The story picks up at the beginning of twins Noah and Jude’s life, right before their mother’s untimely death and winds through their journey of separation and love. Noah, an aspiring artist is a sensitive momma’s boy with a big secret: he’s gay and in love with his neighbor. Jude is also an artist, but is constantly stuck under her brother’s shadow and desperately wants her dead mother’s approval and forgiveness for her grief-induced mistakes. The whole story takes place over a three to four year time jump and embraces the overlying themes of magic and fate that add a special spark in Noah and Jude’s intertwining stories of loss, love, grief and family. I’ll Give You the Sun is a novel that will pull you headfirst into the lives of Noah, with his feelings of failure, and Jude, with her guilt, as they navigate this motherless world and unravel magic and hidden connections they never could have imagined existed.
Despite the particularity of the way the story is told, there is still a very clear beginning, middle, and end, and even though it seems that the story starts in the middle, it somehow still gives readers a satisfied sense of discovery as one continues through the story. Noah and Jude, or NoahandJude, as they often refer to themselves in the book, are joined at the hip, partners in crime, both gifted artists competing for their mother’s attention and slowly destroying their own relationship in the process. Readers shift between the point of view of thirteen to fourteen year old Noah in the direct aftermath of the car accident that killed their mother and sixteen year old Jude a few years later, still deeply affected by everything that happened. Noah not only loses his mother, but gets rejected from his dream art school even though Jude managed to get in, and he somehow managed to gain and promptly lose the trust of his strange neighbor, Brain, whom he’s desperately in love with. Confused and depressed, Noah gives up art and makes it his only goals to get his neighbor to forgive him and not talk to Jude. Jude is haunted by her mother’s ghost who keeps destroying her sculptures at the art school she never wanted to go to and is carrying immense guilt for acting out both before and after her mother’s death. She decides to seek out master sculptor Guillermo Garcia to help her create a sculpture that she hopes will appease her mother, but little does she know that Garcia’s studio holds two big secrets vital to the twin’s story. Through these shifting storylines, older Noah and younger Jude flit in and out and characters appear in one timeline and reappear years later only to meet the other twin. Towards the end, the stories begin to converge, zipping up together seamlessly and leaving readers with a satisfied closure.
The story begins from Noah’s point of view, when his mother is still alive and him and Jude are still close. Noah is different from other, “normal” kids, a “flood in a paper cup” as the author, Jandy Nelson, describes him. He spends most of his time drawing and painting, whether it’s renditions of Michelangelo’s David or sketches of him and Jude. He uses it as an escape from all the real issues in his life, between his disappointed father, the ruthless neighborhood bullies, or Jude’s increasing distance. Noah is also trying to hide the fact that he’s gay from everyone, which becomes increasingly difficult when he meets Brian and is instantly intrigued by the meteorite-collecting, stargazing blonde boy next door. He focuses on applications to art school and spending as much time as he can in the forest with Brian, looking for fallen stars, but when his mother’s car crashes, everything starts falling apart for Noah. Jude has been taken hostage by the popular kids and has converted Brian into her clique and his beautiful artwork has been deemed not good enough with the rejection from art school. Sick of Jude’s games, especially after she purposely tries to steal Brian from him, Noah spills Brian’s big secret and refuses to talk to Jude, effectively cutting out the most important people in his life. Readers learn from Jude’s perspective that a few years later, Noah has covered his feelings of failure with popularity and a constant urge to throw himself off of Devil’s Drop, the highest cliff in the town, even though he can’t swim. Noah’s journey concludes when him and Jude finally uncover the real story behind their mother’s death and he finds his self-acceptance and forgiveness, both for himself and Jude. He even manages to contact “the boy with a suitcase full of stars” (Brian) and start living his life the way he always wanted to.
The story continues with a chapter from Jude’s point of view a few years later, after their mother’s death and when all sorts of problems have blown up in the twin’s faces and torn their family, or what’s left of it, apart. We learn that around the time Noah started earning more and more of his mother’s affection, Jude began feeling left out, drifting further and further from Noah and immersing herself more into the shoes of a “normal” teenager as a distraction, a cry for attention. Readers learn towards the end of the story of certain mistakes Jude made right before her mother’s death, including losing her virginity too early and not sending in her brother’s art school application, and how that impacted the immense amounts of guilt she carried with her through her teenage years. All this guilt builds up in Jude, and coupled with her mother’s ghost destroying all of her art, she decides her only option is to create a certain sculpture that she hopes will appease her mother and help her release her guilt. Jude manages to persuade renowned sculptor Guillermo Garcia to teach her how to sculpt with stone, but little does she know that Guillermo holds many answers she’s been looking for, including the mysterious “Oscore” (Oscar), a confusing arts student who makes Jude want to forget her boy-boycott and Garcia’s hidden letters to “Dearest”. Jude is propelled along her journey of self-forgiveness by her late grandmother’s “Bible”, a book she compiled full of superstitions and advice. Eventually, Jude manages to discover the mysterious connections between Guillermo and her dead mother, with Noah’s help, as well as Oscar’s strange familiarity and conflicting actions. In the end, Jude is able to create the sculpture she so desperately needed to make and her world is finally at peace, not to mention the end of her boy-boycott.
There are three main components to this story that really give it that final sprinkle of extraordinary: the time jumps, the magic and the connections. At first, the idea of different timelines seems confusing, especially since so much is revealed early on in the story. It seems that not much could come from hearing Jude’s story years later. However, it ends up being the very idea that’s needed to make this story work. Hearing things told backwards by Jude and filled in by a young Noah adds depth to the storyline and defines each character separately. Throughout the novel, the twins are just trying to break away from the idea of NoahandJude they’ve been defined as. Giving them each a different period of time to tell their very different, yet still interconnected stories, helps them achieve that separate soul-searching and grieving time to grow so they can finally coexist again, but as their own people. There’s also a layer of magic and extraordinary woven in between sentences and scenes, which really adds a special feeling throughout the book. Ideas like fate and destiny, which Oscar and Jude talk a lot about as well as actual magic, like when Noah seems suspended in the air when he jumps off the cliff in front of Jude. Finally, the “ghosts” Jude sees of her grandmother and mother give the story, especially Jude’s part, a deep emotional connection between the living and the dead suspended between worlds. In the end, this magic helps the story stay constantly connected, so that by the end it’s as if readers have followed the same thread through the different chapters and time periods. It’s also exciting for the reader to continue seeing the same characters crop up in Noah and then Jude’s stories or vice versa.
In the end, I’ll Give You the Sun is simply a beautifully written book about so many intense emotions. From beginning to end, Noah and Jude feel like good friends, yet readers are also pleasantly surprised by the constant twists and turns that make up their story, from their mother’s death, to grief and finally to acceptance and forgiveness. Noah has to learn how to have self-confidence and remember who he really is, has always been, instead of being afraid and blocking out the bad memories. Jude has to finally allow herself to grieve and forgive herself for everything that ever went wrong in her life after making some bad mistakes. Both twins have to learn to grow separately without growing apart amidst the destruction and pain that shadows them. Their story isn’t perfect, but the magic of their connected stories and the amounts of love that guide them along the way inevitably take them where they need to go. A novel you definitely won’t want to miss, I’ll Give You the Sun will have you cheering for Noah, crying with Jude and marveling at the universe and its wonders. After all, “love is only half the story.”
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Anyways, as it happens this is also something I turned in as an essay to my (sarcasm) totally competent and not at all amateurish English teacher this year. So if I get a bad grade, the internet will (hopefully) back me up. Thank you all for reading and again, at the moment the crazy busyness of my life right now is making it difficult to sit down and write a proper post but I hope to free up some time soon! Thanks!
Loreleixx
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