I’ll Give You the Sun Review

Jude and her twin Noah are close until a tragedy drives them apart. Now they are barely speaking – and both falling for boys they can’t have. Love’s complicated.

“Oh, all right,” she says, totally surprising me. “I’ll give you the sun.”

The first thing I have to say about I’ll Give You the Sun, which has absolutely nothing to do with the story, is the fact that I think it is my favourite book cover ever! I think I mainly decided to read it because it was yellow – and yellow is my favourite colour of all time. However, my overall opinion of the actual book, the actual story, was that it was okay. It was neither amazing nor was it awful, it was simply okay. It took me almost twice as long to read than most books I read. Most of the reviews I have read of this book have raved about it, but, honestly, I don’t think it has lived up to the hype.

It took me a while to get into I’ll Give You the Sun, I think mainly because of the writing style which was used. I felt that the use of metaphors was excessive, with at least three metaphors on the first page alone. I never really like metaphors in books as it makes it harder for me to understand what is going on. There was one metaphor in particular which took me a while to understand: “But what I’m certain is to be another artichoke lecture about my bible-thumping tendencies … is cut short because he’s been shot with a stun gun.” For the longest time, I was trying to work out who had shot him, and why, until I realised that he had just noticed something which shocked him. I feel like the overuse of metaphors made the writing seem childish and immature, let alone confusing. Having said this, the writing may have seemed childish and immature because, Noah (one of the narrators in I’ll Give You the Sun), was only thirteen. The fact that Noah was so young in the book also made it hard for me to relate to him thus making it harder for me to read the book. Noah used the phrase ‘toilet-licking’ an excruciating amount throughout the book, which was just plain annoying. However, after I got used to the writing in the book I was able to enjoy it a lot more.

Furthermore, the book alternates between Jude and Noah’s points of view and, with each narrator, the time zone changes back and forth. This makes that much harder to read and understand, especially with all the confusing writing techniques.

I’ll Give You the Sun was a highly character-driven book. This made it interesting to see how each character thought and how they developed, but this didn’t make up for the lack of a storyline. I found it easier to relate to relate to Jude when reading this book, but even she was hard to relate to.

The chapters were way too long for my liking – there were only 8 chapters in the whole book, the longest one being 102 pages long. This made it really exhausting to read and I got so close to just giving up.

I had been planning on reading Jandy Nelson’s first novel, The Sky is Everywhere, but after this one, I may not bother, unless the writing style is any different.

~Martha~

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