I'll Give You the Sun: God I Love These Screwed Up People!

I'll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson

This is an amazing book, okay? There are so so sososo many things I could talk about in this review, because there are just so many amazing little things going on in it that add up to one really amazing story. It has everything an amazing book needs. It has strong, well developed characters, enough personal conflict to get the whole world put on Xanax, a truckload of plot twists, a couple romances that won't make you want to gag, at least a hundred different morals, and finally the perfect conclusion. I could probably write a whole book about this book, if I could organize most of my thoughts into something even mildly coherent. But since I've already written two pages, I think I'll stop.

What I loved

All the feels

I've always loved the books that successfully make me feel what the characters feel. Not just sympathize for them, but actually feel it. This is one of those books. I knew what their mother was up to a little after Jude met Guillarmo, but it didn't bother me until Noah and Jude started hating there mother, and then I was right with them.

The perfect little package

I love love loved how everything just perfectly came together in the end. Usually I need a moment to groan in agony when it happens, but this is a special case. In most books, it feels contrived, like the writer had to twist and pull and stretch the story to fit it into a perfect box. In this book, it feels like any other ending would have made the entire story pointless. The perfect convergence of these characters wasn't forced, it was the whole point of the story.

The art

I like to think of myself as an aspiring artist. Admittedly, I'm not very good, though, so I go long stretches without doing anything at all. This book made me want to get my sketchbook out and start drawing again. It reminded me what it's like to need to get something on paper, and how impossible it is to ignore that need.

The fantasy If you read this blog for any length of time, you'll come to find that fantasy is kind of my thing. I love it in all of its incarnations. While this is supposed to be mostly a realistic story, there is just a touch of fantasy, done in a way with possible deniability. Is Jude really seeing ghosts? Are said ghosts destroying all of her artwork or does she just have incredibly bad luck? Is the Bible a bunch of hogwsh? Is she completely crazy? Does Noah see people's inside faces or is it just a metaphor? Are there actually blow-ins? Did their mother's ghost actually conspire to get everyone together? It has just the right amount of the fantastic to make it magical and make you think without taking the story over.

Noah It's unusual for me to really relate to a character. There might be a moment where I say 'I would totally do that', but to relate to almost every aspect of a single character is pretty much unheard of for me. Everything from referring to the popular kids a hornets to painting in his head, and of course his nearly constant metaphors, really struck a cord with me.

The metaphors There isn't anything I don't love about a good metaphor. I often find myself trying to explain something and all I get is a blank look and a dumb "what?", which ends in me explaining myself again in metaphors that normal people understand. I'm also a huge fan on poetry, particularly the obscure kind that you have to reread a hundred times and decode. So finding metaphors peppered throughout a book is like Christmas for me.

What I didn't love so much

The metaphors

I know, I know. Makes no sense, right? For the most part I adored the metaphors. But every now and then, there was one that completely dragged me out of the story. Maybe it was placement, or the circumstances surrounding them, but sometimes it was hard to tell if they were metaphors at all or if they were actually happening. There was a point where the roof caved in during a really intense scene. I was sitting there staring at the book like 'wait, what?' It completely took me out of the story because it was so unfitting. And then Noah said no one noticed but him, and I was like 'oh, it's just a terribly placed metaphor'. It wouldn't have been so bad if there hadn't just been this whole thing about the roof leaking, complete with buckets sitting around the house to catch the drips.

The dad I'm not saying I didn't like the dad, in fact I think he was a fascinating character. Or he would have been, if he wasn't more of a prop brought out to move the plot forward. For most of the book I felt like he was just kind of there. I want to know more about how he went from being a "unicycle riding super-kook" to an "artichoke" that barely exists. And maybe that's a whole other story that there's no space for in this story, but it feels like he's the only character that never got properly fleshed out. The grandmother that died before the story even started was more prominent than the poor tortured dad.

The overall structure

It felt a bit disjointed, but I think this might be a personal thing more than anything the author did wrong. There aren't a lot of books that switch between points of view that flow properly for me. Considering the fact that the story moved back and forth, not only from character to character every chapter, but also with the three year time jump, I'm not sure if it's even possible to make it less disjointed. It brings up the question of whether it was really necessary. Could she have told the same story with a linear plot, having Noah's part of the story, did a time skip, then telling Jude's part of the story with the big 'it' revealed at the end?

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