Book: I’ll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson

Published September 2014 by Dial|259 pages

Where I Got It: I checked out the e-book from the library!

Series: None

Genre: YA Contemporary/LGBT

Check out I’ll Give You The Sun on goodreads

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.

What I Thought:

After reading The Sky Is Everywhere ages ago and loving it and anxiously awaiting Jandy Nelson’s next book, I finally read I’ll Give You The Sun.

Unfortunately, I’m kind of torn between not really liking it and thinking it was okay.  I really wanted to like it more, because I did love The Sky Is Everywhere.

I did like that Noah and Jude narrated the book.  It’s different from a lot of other multiple narrators in that Noah and Jude are on a different timelines.  Because I don’t pay attention to summaries or anything, I thought it meant that Noah had died or something really bad happened to him because of that timeline, and it took a while for me to realize he was still alive.  But then I was more confused, because if he’s alive, why didn’t he really appear in Jude’s timeline?

It is an interesting way to tell a story, but it didn’t completely work for me.  On the one hand, I do kind of like that they have two different pieces of the story, but at the same time, I felt like the story wasn’t completely there for me because of it.

I just don’t know how I feel about I’ll Give You The Sun.  I was expecting something that more like The Sky Is Everywhere, which I connected so much with, and I really wanted that connection in this book.  That connection did happen, but not until the last 4 or 5 pages, and at that point, I wondered where that was for the rest of the novel.

I didn’t care for Noah or Jude, and I found that Noah randomly titling the scene as a painting to be really annoying, while Jude’s tendency to quote her grandmother’s book was quite.  I did feel for Noah, and I understand how and why he became the person he did.  He had a lot to deal with, especially since Noah is gay, and we see him struggle with how he presents himself to the world.  With Jude, I felt like she stayed relatively the same.  They didn’t feel genuine in the way the characters in her previous novel did.

Let’s Rate It:

Overall, I’ll Give You The Sun just isn’t my book.  I thought the way the story was told was interesting, and a big part of why I kept reading was because 1- I loved the author’s previous book to pieces and gave this one a chance that I probably would not have given it otherwise, and 2- I did want to know what happened and why things fell apart.  I think this book turned out okay for me.  I’ll Give You The Sun gets 2 stars.