I'll Give You the Sun, Jandy Nelson

Pages: 429

Publisher: Walker

Release Date: 2^nd April 2015

Edition: UK paperback

Other Titles by this Author: The Sky is Everywhere

Jude and her twin Noah are close until a tragedy drives them apart. Now they are barely speaking – and both falling for boys they can’t have.

Love’s complicated.

I’ve had a serious book hangover since finishing I’ll Give You the Sun and I honestly don’t know if I’m going to be able to express my lone for it coherently, but here we go!

Now, I thought The Sky is Everywhere was a beautifully written masterpiece when I read it back in 2010 and I vowed to read everything Jandy Nelson would ever write, and after I’ll Give You the Sun I can’t even think of a declaration strong enough for it. It may have taken five years from her debut for this to get into my hands but I would have happily waited another fives. This book is really that good.

Noah and Jude are inseparable. They finish each other’s sentences, know each other inside out and get insanely jealous of the other. The novel alternates between the two siblings; Noah’s life at thirteen and Jude’s life at sixteen. They’re almost two separate stories, interweaving and merging at points, but the separate because the Noah in Jude’s narration isn’t the Noah in his own and vice versa. It makes sense because apparently that was how Nelson constructed the novel – and she wrote it in the dark!

I’ll Give You the Sun is perhaps the most breathtakingly written, passionate, poetic novel I’ve read in a seriously long time, if not ever. The power in her prose is blinding and I just wanted to bask in every single one of them. Couple this with the fact that they’re often discussing art, making art, thinking about art and you get beauty to the n^th degree. It’s intoxicating. Their thoughts are often jumbled, chaotic, of-the-moment and it intensified everything.

Now stop reading my rambles and go buy this book right now, I mean it. And get the UK paperback – yellow sprayed edges and inside illustrations; the outside is as gorgeous as the inside.

Thanks to Walker for the review copy.

Sophie