I’ll Give You The Sun

“The novel is structurally brilliant, moving back and forth across timelines to reveal each teen’s respective exhilaration and anguish  . . . Nelson’s prose scintillates . . . dizzyingly visual . . . startling physicality . . . Here’s a narrative experience readers won’t soon forget.” 

★“Readers are meant to feel big things, and they will—Nelson’s novel brims with emotion.”

★”Nelson structures her sophomore novel brilliantly, alternating between Noah’s first-person narrative in the years before . . . 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.”

★”Nelson’s prose is replete with moments of stunning emotional clarity, and her characters are as irresistible to the reader as they are to each other, particularly young Noah, whose vulnerability is laced with an enviable sense of the aesthetic raptures of everyday life. The controlling ethos throughout, though, is love: no matter how they hurt each other, the love among all the characters is huge here—huge enough to destroy, huge enough to forgive, and huge enough to put their broken world back together again.”

“Breathtaking. You get the sense [the] characters are bursting through the words, breaking free of normal metaphors and constructions, jubilantly trying to rise up from the prison of language . . . The book celebrates art’s capacity to heal, but it also shows us how we excavate meaning from the art we cherish, and how we find reflections of ourselves within it . . . I’ll Give You the Sun is a dazzling mirror.”

“Sun is so much more than just another teenage love story with Real Life Themes; it’s a meditation on life, art, family, fate, and how even the most broken people can help fix one another. Like an artist with a paintbrush, Jandy Nelson weaves it all together to create a reading experience that can only be described as synesthetic. You can taste Noah’s passion, hear the echo of Jude’s grief, and feel the words leap off the page and whip across your face like grains of sand in the wind. This book will tear through you like a hurricane, leaving you in ruined awe. If you want to remember what it’s like to truly surrender to a book and let it pull you under like a riptide, pick up I’ll Give You the Sun and bask in it.”

“Ingeniously told from the alternating perspectives of its spunky twin protagonists, this (technically) young adult novel jubilantly holds its own against the fall’s grown-up offerings, with dead-on insights about surviving youth—and family.”

“A gravity-defying, life-affirming experience.”

“Dynamic . . . (Nelson) has an electrifying facility with description, especially of how her characters feel at a given moment . . . (Jude), Noah and the fine cast of subsidiary characters . . . are most memorable for how poignantly they illustrate the most basic of human emotions — love, grief, shame, remorse, joy.”

“Occasionally, I’ve gotten so involved in a book that I’ve missed my subway stop because I was reading; Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You the Sun might be the first time where I saw my stop and skipped it anyway . . . Give is a breathtaking novel about secrets—how keeping them can destroy us and releasing them can set us free. Yet for all its dark moments (which include suicide attempts, sexual assault, and infidelity), the writing is suffused with playfulness and love. Nelson manages the nearly impossible task of keeping the reader on constant tenterhooks, yet never letting us doubt that she has the best interest of all her characters at heart . . . But what really sets Give apart from other YA novels is its writing. Nelson doesn’t pander to her readers. Her sentences and structure are complex and imaginative. If you enjoy the high-intensity pace of young-adult writing, but often find yourself wishing for a semi-colon or a mind-blowing metaphor, I’ll Give You the Sun is the book for you.”

“This book is about many things: grief, sexuality, creativity, bravery, identity, guilt. But mostly it’s about love. Be prepared with more tissues than you needed for The Fault in Our Stars, a chunky notebook to scribble down all the quotes and a handful of witty responses when people ask why you’re chuckling to yourself in the corner. Because this book will make you realise how beautiful words can be.”

‘The story is full of compelling, big characters who are fully saturated with emotion and witticisms and are also industrious and creative; Jude sculpts, and Noah paints. Charting the spectrum of mountainous teenage emotion, and though written vibrantly, it remains believable, tenable and real.”

“One of Fall’s most anticipated YA books . . . While the novel falls under YA, it’s filled with complex and controversial themes that are relatable to anyone who has struggled with identity, sexuality, family ties and other struggles of growing up.”

“An examination of finding and learning what it means to live for yourself . . . compelling to the very end.”

“This is a beautifully written story.”

“A wild, beautiful, and profoundly moving novel. Jandy Nelson’s writing is so electric, so alive, her pages practically glow in the dark.”

“Jandy Nelson is a rare, explosive talent. Her prose is vivid, breathtaking, and drenched in passion, and her stories remind me why words can change the world.”

“An extraordinary book! I’ve never read anything like it. Lyrical-unique-passionate-magical-tragic-hopeful—Nelson’s characters will fly off the page and into your heart.”

“Jandy Nelson’s writing is poetic and mesmerizing. More importantly, Nelson weaves a novel that seeps into your bones like fire on a cold day . . . I’ll Give You the Sun is a novel that promises a story like nothing else and then delivers it.”

“I love this book. Jandy Nelson is my new writing hero. Read it. She’ll be your favorite author as well.”

“This is a stunning, artfully woven story. My heart burst open at the blazing, unforgettable end. Magnificent.”