"I'll give you the sun" by Jandy Nelson - Review

The twins Noah and Jude are inseperable – both are interested in art and have an artistic disposition but apart from this they are rather different. Noah, who draws, is closer to their mother, and the sewing and sculpting Jude has a better relationship with their father. Noah is an introvert original while Jude is popular and spends a lot of time with her surfer friends at the beach. Still, they are hand in glove with each other – until puberty hits and everything changes. Both want to attend the Californian School of Arts, and thus a rivalry for the mothers attention and support forms who seems to be somewhere completely else mentally. Noah discovers his homosexuality and doesn't really know how to deal with it, Jude herself makes first experiences with love, and slowly, the siblings grow apart more and more, become stranger to each other, and when their mother dies in a car accident, their connection is lost for good.

All of this is told from 13 years old Noahs point of view. Three years later, Jude tells us about the current situation where the twins' roles seem to have switched: Jude is attending art school, is seclusive, hardly cares for friendships and keeps boys away from herself, whereas Noah is cool and popular but gave up drawing. They hardly talk to each other. Jude has a hard time sculpting in school, all her clay works break mystically. She believes that her dead mothers ghost is so angry with her that she is breaking her works. Jude wants to make up for something, and for that she needs stone, a statue, and a mentor to teach her statuary. She finds that in the bizarre artist Guillermo – and with him, she finds Oscar, a mysterious English boy who makes it hard for her to hold her boycott on boys up.

Incredibly sensitive and gentle Jandy Nelson guides us through the exceptional twins' emotions. The subject of the siblings who love each other but still are in concurrence to each other is rarely found in young adult fiction in a way this unique. Jandy Nelson combines family drama, LGBT+ literature, coming of age story and, yes, a love story and manages to find an own style that is hardly comparable with other authors.