I’ll Give You the Sun

by Marygrace Shumann, Contributing Editor

Told from alternating perspectives, I’ll Give You The Sun is a poignant character study on twins Jude and Noah as they deal with the intricacies of self-worth, death, and love.

Noah’s sections are told before their mother passes away in a car crash. Throughout his sections, Noah begins to having feelings for a boy named Bryan while, at the same time, growing apart from his twin sister, Jude. This sort of cosmic connection that Noah himself describes with, “Unlike most everyone else on earth, from the very first cells of us, we were together, we came here together. This is why no one hardly notices that Jude does most of the talking for both of us, why we can only play piano with all four of our hands on the keyboard and not at all alone, why we can never do Rochambeau because not once in thirteen years have we chosen differently,” is broken as Noah’s love and understanding for art brings him closer to their mother, while Jude (who doesn’t feel her art is as worthy as Noah’s) becomes jealous of their connection. Throughout his sections, Noah is trying to get into a prestigious art school. As he learns more about himself as an artist, Noah begins to draw in his head, allowing the reader to merge the gap between art and artist. He describes his own process saying, “When I draw it, I’m going to make my skin see-through and what you’ll see is that all the animals in the zoo of me have broken out of their cages.” The novel itself breathes like a painting, a sculpture, a sketch. The descriptions are not only vivid, but both lifelike and mystical. Noah’s sections in particular are bursting with imagery that feels unworldly and yet, like a beautiful painting, so anchored to reality. The style Nelson takes allows us to better understand that line between what we feel and what is, which rings particularly true as both Noah and Jude begin to face the harsher realities of life.

While in Noah’s sections, Jude is belligerent and rebellious, in her own section, years after their mother’s passing, we find Jude to be more reserved. Attending the art school her brother felt was destined for him after she destroyed his application, Jude is filled with an unspeakable guilt. Everything she tries to make is destroyed, Jude believes, by the ghost of her mother. While Noah’s sections are filled with vibrant imagery—emotions described with color, sounds described with scene—Jude’s sections deal closely with her ability to put into words both her own feelings, and the feelings of those around her. Noah paints, but Jude is more concerned with making a sculpture. Throughout her sections, Jude wants to make something solid, something she believes won’t break. This is shown through a more matter-of-fact style of writing. As Jude falls for a boy her brother painted years before, and accidentally becomes the student of the man her mother was having an affair with, Jude begins to understand the lines between forgiving yourself and forgiving others. As she grapples for answers, Jude’s ultimate character growth comes in her ability to let things be, let things break, and let things come back together on their own. “Because who knows?” she says, “Who knows anything? Who knows who’s pulling the strings? Or what is? Or how? Who knows if destiny is just how you tell yourself the story of your life?” As Jude finally forgives herself for what she did to her brother, she gives her brother the freedom to confess to her the guilt he feels surrounding their mother’s death. It is this freedom of confession that finally allows Jude to understand the middleground and see things less as a plan to follow through with, and moreso as something messy, the breathing nature of relationships and self.

Told with a vibrancy and emotional maturation seldomly found in Young Adult fiction, Nelson weaves a haunting and meaningful story about family and self-discovery.

Marygrace Schumann, lesbian mother of the team, is a senior at Columbia College Chicago studying Fiction Writing. When she’s not writing, it’s all about Cheesie’s and serenading her friends with ’80s music.

April 17, 2017