When Noah and Jude Sweetwine, the twin teenage protagonists in Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You the Sun, are young, they’re practically inseparable, but as the story unfolds, it’s revealed that something happened between the two of them to cause them to stop speaking. Readers get bits of both sides of the story from Noah, who is in charge of covering their younger years, and Jude, whose job is to tell readers about three years later, the present day. Noah is in the process of coming to terms with his sexuality in the form of their new neighbor, Brian, while Jude is dealing with feelings of inadequacy from her dead mother destroying all her art projects, as well as the fact that her only friend is the ghost of her grandmother.
Nelson’s choice to have each twin take turns narrating poses some questions that piqued my curiosity and made me want to keep reading: Brian and Noah aren’t talking anymore; why not? Noah, artist extraordinaire whose happiness seemed to depend on attending the California School of the Arts for high school, didn’t get in, while Jude, who wasn’t even planning on applying and couldn’t really care less, did; how’d that happen? What happened to Jude’s and Noah’s mom? Who are Guillermo Garcia and Oscar, and how do they tie in with the rest of the Sweetwine family? Where the hell is Ralph?
There are so many questions that need answering, but the main one that I have is why I didn’t enjoy this book more.
I’ll Give You the Sun was a bit like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood for me–I had heard amazing things about it, that it was wonderful and perfect and the best story in years, but when I finally saw the movie, I was underwhelmed. The same thing happened with I’ll Give You the Sun.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some things I absolutely adored about this book. Noah and Jude are both artists, and their unique descriptions–Noah’s especially–of the world around them are kickass. I loved how they saw everything as art, and described it as such, but the story itself just fell flat with me. The characters are quirky, for sure, but I didn’t start becoming really invested in them until the last few chapters; I had questions about what was going on, but I didn’t feel like I needed to know the answers until the very end, and even then, so many answers were coming at me so quickly that it was a little overwhelming, as if Nelson suddenly realized that the book was almost over and she needed to start wrapping things up. Oops, guess I should have focused on moving the plot forward instead of describing the edge of a forest for five pages.
It bums me out to write this, because I really did want to love it. I’ll Give You the Sun was a nice story, but nothing about it felt mind-blowingly wonderful or original to me. It was a good listen, but nothing I’d revisit or buy for my book-loving friends as birthday or Christmas presents.
My favorite part of the audiobook was actually the narrators, Julia Whelan and Jesse Bernstein. They both did wonderful jobs of channeling their characters, as well as all the characters around them. Their voices complemented each other really well as they switched from chapter to chapter, and their pacing was on-point; I’d definitely like to listen to more books narrated by one or both of them.
Story: 3 out of 5 stars
Narration: 5 out of 5 stars
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Allison Racicot is the Audiobook Reviewer at Girls in Capes. She’s a recent graduate of Emerson College in Boston, and has a degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. She spends too much time listening to podcasts and getting overly attached to fictional characters.
