Title: I’ll Give You The Sun
Author : Jandy Nelson
Publisher : Dial Books
Release date : September 16th, 2014
Rating : 4.7/5
☯ Synopsis (from 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.
⚜ Review :
It was a joyous day when I picked up I’ll Give You the Sun, sat down on my couch and drank from my I’ll Give You the Moon mug.
It was overwhelmingly clear to me, and probably to every reader who’s read her book, that Jandy Nelson thought and thought and thought about every word laid down on the page. They were precise, they were evocative, they were poignant. Her writing skills are amazing and amazingly expressive. Otherwise, how could she manage to alternate between two characters, two time periods, and give them each their own personality? I recognized both Noah and Jude by the way they think, and never had trouble figuring out whose chapter I was reading. Nelson really did a great job at giving them each their own narration styles.
Talking about Noah and Jude… Jude tends to talk to her dead grandmother. Hold on. No, she’s not a medium. Simply, she has a strong connection to her spiritual side, and her grandmother is her “imaginative” confidant. On his part, Noah tends to speak in metaphors. Vibrant and original metaphors. It surprised me a little how creative he was. But I shouldn’t be surprised… Here, the Artist stereotype holds: they think differently, they are eccentric.
Jude barfs bright blue fluorescent barf all over the table, but I’m the only one who notices.
Noah loves to draw, Jude loves to sculpt. A form of art I actually don’t see enough of, and yet it must be captivating to watch. We see Noah at 13 years old and Jude at 16 years old. In the period where we read about them, they are both introverts, quite impulsive and dramatic; it all adds to their charm. I found myself very protective of them, like I had to shelter them from all the harm and confusion that the outer world could bring. The challenges they both face put them through situations that I think we could all relate to. It was an incredibly vulnerable stance on growth and self-discovery.
Even the secondary characters were all very three-dimensional. They each had their own backstory, and a distinctive personality, and I could’ve spent days reading about them!
This is not a happy, light-hearted and typically feel-good story. If you dive in it, you’re in for a whirlwind of emotions and feelings. It’s a journey of discovering your own voice, bonding and rebonding with your family, and, ultimately, coming to terms with who you expected to be and who you are now.