The Book That is Not Like the Other Books

I am 100% certain that I’ll Give You the Sun will be my favourite book ever as long as I shall live and if there is an afterlife I will remember it too and even if I get reincarnated it will be the one thing that I have in my soul’s archives. 

The whole book was exploding with emotions and whimsically abstract realities. It truly changed the way I saw the world. I felt like a muggle in Harry Potter who suddenly saw the true magical world behind the mist. Or perhaps more accurately, a muggle who figured out they were capable of magic. 

First of all, Jandy Nelson is definitely an alien who has revealed to us the true beauty of our world and our own minds. I find it kind of unbelievable how the characters that narrate I’ll Give You the Sun, aren’t actually real. It really showed me how Jandy Nelson had those characters in her, they were clearly just two of millions of different perceptions and people in her mind. How could anyone replicate the way her main characters think in paintings and poems?

In fact this book is so incredibly fused with art, it’s like Jandy Nelson was actually creating a hundred mini works of art, and this story just existed to tie them all together. Its undeniable that shes an artist herself, by the way she describes the ecstasy of completing a piece and the way making art is like wishing with your hands. She really magnifies every event in her novel through the eyes of her main characters. It’s like they don’t have eyes or lungs or hands because their hearts do everything for them. 

She creates this masterpiece about passion and grief and although it doesn’t follow the same order as novels, she ends up incorporating all the themes of every book I’ve ever read into one. You can see the astronomical amount of experiences she's had because she throws it all up into a Jackson Pollock type book. She compacts all these themes into one, till it’s as ambiguous as any work of art. Her book was exhilaratingly similar to a painting or a symphony because it was so powerful and timeless. In the end it didn’t feel like a story, it feel more like looking at an extreme painting, because nothing was complete without something else. It’s also one of those books that really highlights how everyone is similar to one another and everything is different at the same time. 

Her book was kind of detached to our world, but in a way that made it relatable to everyone. She didn’t write a book as much as conduct a symphony, where everyone feels the tension, the crushing revertebrating notes, the hopeful and tentative mood shifts, the spiraling and confusion, vigorously switching between Phantom of the Opera and West Side story. Even if you’ve never lived in a war, or in a world where everything was unfair, or had a relative die, or had a crisis of faith, you still go through the same tornado of feelings and understand the twistedness the main characters feel.

Jandy Nelson writes as two twins, Noah and Jude, Noah is bursting with colors and melting into everything around him, while Jude is super superstitious and clever and although she thinks in words and doesn’t show her genius as often, and her imagination is more realistic, she sees the world just as uniquely as Noh does. Noah narrates their first years as twins, inseparable and intertwined, as one. Then when Jude narrates 3 years later everything is backwards and everything that could possibly go wrong has apparently gone wrong. It jumps back and forth and you’re holding your breath for the moment when their stories collide. And the craziest part is that even after they do, there’s a huge plot twist. 

-Sophia D.