I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson review - emotionally driven teen narrative

This story of arty American twins is breathily satisfying, but is the fashion for intense first-person narratives constraining YA fiction?

There is a particular type of YA novel that’s very much in vogue, in which a first-person narrator emotes somewhat breathily about the intensity of their teenage existence, often with deliberate emphasis on just how much of a misfit he or she is.

If you like narratives of this sort, you’ll respond well to I’ll Give You the Sun. Here we’re given not one but two of these first-person accounts, from California twins Noah and Jude. In a clever conceit, the alternating narratives are set apart by three years; the sections called The Invisible Museum voiced by Noah aged 13, and those from his sister Jude called The History of Luck taking place when they’re 16. The interplay between these narratives allows us to witness the formative events of the twins’ teenage years not only from both their perspectives, but also from Before and After certain massive events. Their attempts to get into art college, the separation of their parents and the death of their mother are among the many significant happenings which fuel a rift between the twins who, until the novel begins, have been the one-starts-a-sentence-the-other-finishes-it kind of siblings.

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