Judging A Book By Its Cover

They say don’t judge a book by its cover. But when it comes to “I’ll Give You the Sun,” maybe you should. Rays of rainbow-colored sparks shoot out from the title, making it appear to be a blazing, explosive sun. The rays, from the lightest periwinkle to the darkest indigo, exude a fiery beauty.

The cover shows the essence of the book: a book that is so full of joy that it bursts.

“I’ll Give You the Sun,” by Jandy Nelson, tells the story of fraternal twins, Noah and Jude. They are opposites to the point of being clichéd: Noah is a quiet, shy and friendless boy, while Jude is an extroverted, daring and proud girl. They are almost like two halves of the same person. When they want to escape their parents’ constant fighting, they sit right next to each other on the couch to calm each other down. Each twin always needs the other.

While they’re so close with each other, they’re also competitive. They are forced to compete for the favor of their parents, because Noah can’t live up to his dad’s expectations and Jude and her mom can never agree on anything. At the same time, they are competing to get into a top-notch art school. Then, after an accident that changes their previously nuclear family, their story is suddenly split into a before and after. Noah tells the before, and Jude tells the after. Two halves of the same story.

The character and plot line that made the biggest impact on me was Noah and his love story with the new boy next door, Brian. It could have easily been written as predictable and boring. Instead, Nelson takes the opportunity to describe the feelings of a teenage boy dealing with the impossibility of coming out and loving somebody he’s not expected to love.

The coming-of-age aspect of the story is shown when Noah asks himself, “What makes you say the opposite of what every cell in your body wants you to say?” after running away from Brian and the possibility of revealing his true feelings for him.

Throughout the book, Noah and Jude express their feelings through their art. Noah paints and draws constantly, and Jude sculpts. By making her characters artists, Nelson allows herself to be more creative and intense with her word choice and imagery. One of my favorite scenes was a description of Noah running through the forest near his house.

In this scene, sprinting through the forest and imagining his world full of color, Noah thinks up a a title for a painting: “Self-Portrait: Boy Detonates Grenade of Awesome.” Throughout the book, he is constantly creating titles for paintings that describe how he imagines himself and the world around him.

Personally, I’m terrible at art. It bores me. I can’t draw, paint or sculpt. I don’t see the deeper meaning or symbols in artwork. But Noah changed my perspective, even if it was just a little. I found myself dreaming up paintings about my own life. While the paintings from my life focused more around homework or brushing my teeth, Noah’s were inspiring and insightful.

When I read the painting title Boy Detonates Grenade of Awesome, I imagined Noah pulling the ring out of an olive-green, ugly grenade, and just every shade of green, yellow and purple that Nelson described earlier exploding out of it. I want to see this painting in real life.

These colorful, literal word-paintings made the book so much more enchanting to read. It was so easy to imagine the story with vivid, in-depth descriptions of each scene and each character.

As Jude discovers what she wants to create and Noah falls in love, I watched as Noah and Jude fought each other and loved each other, sabotaged each other and then saved each other. Each twin fought to break away from the other, to become their own person and to choose their own family and loves.

“I’ll Give You the Sun” could not have been a more colorful, enigmatic and only slightly clichéd read. It had love stories, coming-of-age tales and family feuds.

Without that bright, vibrant cover drawing me in, I don’t know if I would have chosen to read this book. It turned out that it embodied the boldness and creativity of the story and writing style of the author herself.

To listen to an audio version of the book, visit here.