This is summer...

I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson was shimmering and magical. That’s really the only way I know how to describe it. Admittedly, the book isn’t for everyone and it definitely is not for tweens and middle schoolers. The less I say about the actual plot, the better because I think each person who reads it will bring their own ideas to the story and see it differently. This is one of the reasons why the book felt like magic. The story is realistic fiction but while I read it, I found undertones of fantasy. Again, there’s magic within the pages of this book.

Noah and Jude are twins and very much see themselves as NoahandJude. They are eccentric, artistic, passionate and feeling. The chapters alternate between Noah and Jude. In Noah’s chapters, the twins are 13; in Jude’s, they are 16. The brilliancy of the story is that we only know 13 year old Jude through her brother’s eyes and we only know 16 year old Noah through his sister’s eyes. Somewhere in between these years, tragedy has struck the family and both twins have done things that they regret deeply. Things they have done to each other and to the family. Noah and Jude each only have half the information as do the readers.

It’s as if the twins have switched places in each of their narrations. At 13, Jude is popular, wild, and mainstream while Noah is an outsider, socially awkward and trying to hide the fact or understand that he’s gay. At 16, the twins are barely speaking to each other and Noah is part of the “in” crowd, hanging out with girls and cliff diving while Jude is the outsider and “hiding” in her own skin under a self-described boycott of boys and love. At 13, Noah is a shoe-in to attend a prestigious art school while at 16, Jude is a student at the school while Noah no longer paints or draws.

The undercurrent of fantasy comes in how each twin tells their story. Noah is still an artist in his chapters and he regularly imagines how he would paint any given situation and titles these paintings. Being an artist myself, I love the names he gives these mind portraits because they are so spot on for the different emotions he goes through. Jude believes that she talks to her grandmother’s spirit while her mother’s spirit destroys her ceramic projects. The reader hears the voice of the grandmother through Jude’s storytelling and it sometimes feels as if we are meant to decide whether or not this is really happening.

Both twins have a love story to tell and this is where the real magic of the story lies. I will admit, I have never been in love, but everyone has felt that moment when you meet someone who feels like they are radiating sunshine directly onto you. Jandy Nelson’s writing in these moments is exquisite! Being around the object of your affection is described as your IQ taking a dip because you are so tongue tied, you trip over your words and everything you say sounds dumb. I mean who can’t relate to that feeling?! And then I think I actually might have swooned a bit when Noah says, “I’m thinking the reason I’ve been so quiet all these years is only because Brian wasn’t around yet for me to tell everything to.” Who doesn’t want that kind of connection with another human being?

I can get annoyed with a story when everything gets tied together in the end or if I can tell where the author is taking me, but that didn’t happen with I’ll Give You the Sun. Everything that gets revealed in the end, while it does come full circle, feels more like redemption than like the author rounding up all the story lines into one. Honesty is chosen over hiding oneself, relationships are repaired and characters are willing to admit that they are different and maybe better because of the bad that has happened. I didn’t love this book, I know it isn’t for everyone, I didn’t devour it, I took my time, but this book is staying with me and it touched me deep down. While these characters are typical melodramatic artists, they are people too and they allow us to see their humanity in the way they find love, worry over it, lose it, and find it again.