I'll Give You The Sun

I'll Give You The Sun

by Jandy Nelson

Synopsis:

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.

My thoughts:

I'll Give You The Sun is told in alternating voices by twins Noah and Jude who used to be inseparable. Noah tells his side of the story when he is 13.  Both twins are artists and their mom decides they should be attending the California School of Art, a very prestigious art school.  Jude has no desire to go to the "freak school" and leave all her friends but Noah, who has never fit in, loves the idea and becomes almost obsessive in his quest to gain a spot at CSA. The arrival of Brian to their coastal town is the only other event that Noah truly cares about as he experiences first love and the pain that can accompany it.  Jude's story is told three years later when the twins are 16 and the twins are barely talking to each other. She is on a "boy boycott" after a bad sexual experience followed almost immediately by her mother's death in a car crash; she has been accepted into the art school and is a sculptor student there while Noah for reasons unknown was not admitted.  Jude believes she is being haunted by both her grandmother who tries to help and her mom who hates her; in an effort to please her mom she turns to a brilliant but troubled sculptor for mentoring and meets Oscar who is a definite threat to her self-imposed boy boycott.  I'll Give You The Sun is a story about grief, betrayal, and love. Over the course of this novel the reader sees the twin’s relationship fall apart in Noah's story and slowly start to mend in Jude’s. With both twins being artists, the narration is stunning and Nelson is to be congratulated on her ability to give each twin such a distinct voice; Noah's narrative is a full of dramatic over-the-top descriptions as well as lots of unbelievable color while Jude's, which has been affected by her mother's death, is deeply emotional and peppered with her grandmother's "bible wisdom" (such as Nothing curdles love in the heart like lemon on the tongue). Between all the emotional highs and lows that the twins experience and the beautiful writing Nelson offers this is a novel that will not be quickly forgot by readers.