I'll Give You the Sun

Wow. This book is beautiful. Absolutely loved it.

Full review:

I'm not sure what I expected when I picked up I'll Give You the Sun. I knew the basics: dual POV, everyone seems to love it, LGBTQIA+ themes, and then it went ahead and won the Printz a few days after I started reading, so I knew chances that I was going to like it were high.

But wow, you guys. I really really loved this one.

I'm not an externally emotional reader. I mean, I obviously have feels like everyone else, but I've yet to read a book that made me cry, as I've confessed here before, and I'm usually pretty good about keeping a stoic exterior while reading. But I'll Give You the Sun put me on the brink of tears several times, which is ridiculously rare for me, and I just loved Noah and Jude so much, and the writing!

The writing. I think Nelson's prose is one of those love/hate varieties, but I definitely fell on the love side. Both Noah and Jude's voices were a little out there with some of the imagery and analogies, but I felt like I really got it, and it totally made sense to me with their very artsy personalities, and it just felt so fresh, and wonderful, and fit the tone of the book beautifully.

Noah and Jude aren't perfect. They both make hurtful, cringe-worthy mistakes with big consequences. They're emotional, and young, and full of dreams, and highs, and lows, and I became so very emotionally entangled with their stories.

I often tell people that the best books make you feel something. I'll Give You the Sun didn't make me feel something—it made me feel everything. I loved every page, and Nelson's got herself a new fan for sure.

Would not have finished if it wasn't on the BOB list. The trying was so hard here: too precious, secondary characters were bad cliches, the main characters acted like assholes with no real redemption arc other than apologies years later, and the worst offender, “gay” is used as a personality trait. Have heard her first book is better, but I'm disinclined to try it after this.

Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people. Maybe we're accumulating these new selves all the time. Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.