I'll Give You the Sun

sshans2 - In short, this book leaves you with enough thoughts about life, morality, betrayal, and family, to last you a lifetime. Noah and Jude are the closest twins you'll ever meet: they're each other's best friends, have their own inside jokes, original games, and know each other better than anyone. Noah has always been less social than Jude, an outsider, an outcast, spending his time with his sketchbook and paints. Jude, on the other hand, has always fit in at school, making friends, cliff-diving, and wearing red lipstick. Once it's time to enter high school, however, jealousy and competition get the best of them, demolishing all the closeness that made up their relationship. They lose people, meet people, and fall in love, on the path back to how it once was. Nelson managed to write this all so elegantly through alternating perspectives told from twins' eyes (rather than a couple's), and during alternating times. Jude's story is told from when they're 16. Noah's is from when they're 13-14. How Nelson made this work so beautifully?-- I have no idea.

Starred review from June 23, 2014
Twins Noah and Jude are inseparable until misunderstandings, jealousies, and a major loss rip them apart. Both are talented artists, and creating art plays a major role in their narratives. Both also struggle with their sexuality—Noah is gay, which both thrills and terrifies him, while Jude is recovering from a terrible first sexual experience at age 14, one of two important reasons she has sworn off dating. Nelson (The Sky Is Everywhere) unravels the twins’ stories in long chapters that alternate between their perspectives. Noah’s sections are set when the twins are 13, Jude’s at age 16, giving readers slanted insights into how their relationship deteriorated and how it begins to mend. The twins’ artistic passions and viewpoints suffuse their distinctive voices; Noah tends toward wild, dramatic overstatements, and Jude’s world is wrapped up in her late grandmother’s quirky superstitions and truisms. Readers are meant to feel big things, and they will—Nelson’s novel brims with emotion (grief, longing, and love in particular) as Noah, Jude, and the broken individuals in their lives find ways to heal. Ages 14–up. Agent: Holly McGhee, Pippin Properties.

September 1, 2014
Twins Noah and Jude used to be NoahandJude-inseparable till betrayal and tragedy ripped them apart.Nelson tells her tale of grief and healing in separate storylines, one that takes place before their art-historian mother's fatal car accident and one that takes place after, allowing readers and twins to slowly understand all that's happened. An immensely talented painter, Noah is 13 1/2 in his thread, when Brian moves in next door to their coastal Northern California home. His intense attraction to Brian is first love at its most consuming. Jude is 16 in hers, observing a "boy boycott" since their mother's death two years earlier; she is also a sculpture student at the California School of the Arts-which, inexplicably, Noah did not get into. Haunted by both her mother and her grandmother, she turns to an eccentric sculptor for mentoring and meets his protege, a dangerously charismatic British college student. The novel is structurally brilliant, moving back and forth across timelines to reveal each teen's respective exhilaration and anguish but holding the ultimate revelations back until just the right time. Similarly, Nelson's prose scintillates: Noah's narration is dizzyingly visual, conjuring the surreal images that make up his "invisible museum"; Jude's is visceral, conveying her emotions with startling physicality. So successful are these elements that the overdetermined, even trite conclusion will probably strike readers as a minor bump in the road. Here's a narrative experience readers won't soon forget. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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Starred review from September 1, 2014

Gr 9 Up-A resplendent novel from the author of The Sky Is Everywhere (Dial, 2010). Fraternal twins and burgeoning artists Jude and Noah are inseparable until puberty hits and they find themselves competing for boys, a spot at an exclusive art school, and their parents' affections. Told in alternating perspectives and time lines, with Noah's chapters taking place when they are 13 and Jude's when they are 16, this novel explores how it's the people closest to us who have the power to both rend us utterly and knit us together. Jude's takes are peppered with entries from her bible of superstitions and conversations with her grandmother's ghost, and Noah continuously imagines portraits (complete with appropriately artsy titles) to cope with his emotions. In the intervening years, a terrible tragedy has torn their family apart, and the chasm between the siblings grows ever wider. Vibrant imagery and lyrical prose propel readers forward as the twins experience first love, loss, betrayal, acceptance, and forgiveness. Art and wonder fill each page, and threads of magical realism lend whimsy to the narrative. Readers will forgive convenient coincidences because of the characters' in-depth development and the swoon-worthy romances. The novel's evocative exploration of sexuality, grief, and sibling relationships will ring true with teens. For fans of Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl (St. Martin's, 2013) and Melina Marchetta's realistic fiction. See author Q&A, p. 152.-Shelley Diaz, School Library Journal

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2014
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* When Noah's mom suggests that he and his twin sister, Jude, apply to a prestigious arts high school, he is elated, but Jude starts simmering with jealousy when it becomes clear that their mother favors Noah's work. Noah soaks up the praise, though a little callously, happy to hone his painting skills and focus on the guy across the street, who could be more than a friend. Fast-forward three years, and everything is in pieces. Their mother has died in a car crash, and Noah, who wasn't accepted to art school, has given up painting, while Jude, who was accepted but is no longer the shimmering, confident girl she once was, is struggling in her sculpture class. All her clay forms shatter in the kiln; is her mother's ghost the culprit? Determined to make a piece that her mother can't ruin, Jude seeks out the mentorship of a fiery stone carver (and his alluring model, Oscar). Nelson structures her sophomore novel brilliantly, alternating between Noah's first-person narrative in the years before the accident and Jude's in the years following, slowly revealing the secrets the siblings hide from each other and the ways they each throw their hearts into their artwork. In an electric style evoking the highly visual imaginations of the young narrators, Nelson captures the fraught, antagonistic, yet deeply loving relationship Jude and Noah share.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)