"Hope is the thing with feathers":The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon

I read Nicola Yoon's new YA novel in one evening. I had enjoyed her first novel, Everything, Everything; Yoon's second novel The Sun is Also a Star is even better.

First, I will admit that a story only about teenagers falling in love won't catch my interest. I'm not a hopeless romantic, and my teenage days date to the 1960s. But for those readers who love a good love story, Yoon delivers.

What I adore about The Sun is Also a Star is how Yoon combines a good love story, vivid characters with complex families and backgrounds, philosophical discussions on the nature of love, science, and human nature, and social commentary.

Daniel: "I think we are all connected, everyone on earth." Natasha:" Even the bad people?" Daniel: "Yes. But everyone has at least a little good in them...I think all the good parts of us are connected at some level....I think that's God. God is the connection of the very best parts of us." 

The Sun is Also a Star brings together, seemingly randomly, two high school seniors and depicts their one day together as they slowly reveal who they are and fall in love. Everything they do impacts other people, changing their lives as well.

Daniel is the son of South Korean immigrants who expect him to use his American opportunities to earn a high profile career and big income. At heart, Daniel is a poet. Natasha and her family are illegal aliens from Jamaica; her family is ordered to leave the country that day. Natasha holds to science and objectivity, distrusting romance and sentiment. Daniel falls for Natasha and spends the day convincing her to love him.

As we learn about the characters and their families we also learn about the realities of immigrant life, the feelings of displacement and hard cultural adjustment. A chapter on Korean American History explains the history of how South Koreans became experts in African American hair care. Daniel's brother desperately wants to be 'American' and rejects his heritage and his family in the process. Natasha's father came to America to act, and he has a remarkable ability but his thick accent precludes his advancement. His family lives in near poverty, Natasha and her nine-year-old brother sharing the living room as their bedroom.

As Daniel and Natasha progress through the stages of new love, even to their first fight and separation, Yoon shares their thoughts in lovely epigrams.

"We tell ourselves there are reasons for the things that happened, but we're just telling ourselves stories. We make them up. They don't mean anything."

"Touching him is like order and chaos, like being assembled and disassembled at the same time."

"Maybe falling in love with someone else is also falling in love with yourself. I like who I am with her."

The lovers struggle with the impact of their families expectations and experiences of racism and class. "Who are we if not a product of our families and their histories?" wonders Natasha. Parents "can't see past their own history," and they want to protect their children by encouraging, or forcing them onto paths for their own good Daniel learns.

 The book has been on the YA bestseller book and won acclaim. For good reason.

I received a free book through Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Sun is Also a Star
Nicola Yoon
Delacorte Press
$18.99 hard cover
ISBN: 978-0-53349668-0

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves..."
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Hazel thinks of herself as a grenade, ready to go off at any moment, inevitably hurting those who love her.

Augustus thinks Helen is the love of his life.

The story of teenagers with terminal cancer in love sounds like a real downer, and tears will fall as you read this book, but the story is actually uplifting and strangely comforting.

I have been uninspired by the book I have been reading for some weeks. I am over half way through the 770 pages, but the characters are not nice and I am having trouble finishing it. So I opened up this Kindle book just because of the title, and found it was just what I needed--an engaging book with great characters, insight into the human condition, and an emotional connection to the story.

For awards, praise and  more here is the author's web page:
http://johngreenbooks.com/the-fault-in-our-stars/

For a good plot summery go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fault_in_Our_Stars.



via: jonhselforever

Cancer took both my parents and an uncle. I was with my dad daily during his last months in the hospital. Hard as it is to lose someone to cancer when they are 52 or 57 or 78 it is even harder when a child developers cancer. Likely environmental issues took the lives of my family members--smoking, exposure to toxins or environmental pollutants.

But the teenagers in this book have rare forms of cancer that are not related to anything external or environmental or to choices they have made. Augustus appears to be in the 80% survival group, while Hazel is buying time with an experimental drug. Facing death before age 20 creates a real existential crisis. But these kids also tell it as it is; tired of the way well people treat them they tell each other the hard facts. They bandy about witticisms and are irreverent to their disease.



"The inexorable truth is this: They might be glad to have me around, but I was the alpha and the omega of my parent's suffering."

"Most parents don't really know their children."

"Nostalgia is a side effect of dying."

This may not be how teenagers you know talk. One criticism of the book is that these kids sound awfully erudite.

"People always get used to beauty, though."

Still, I love the little epigrams and thoughts that appear throughout the story. It makes one think. The dying who know their time is limited see the beauty whereas the rest of us are focused on money or our career or our problems. Is this true? For some I know it is. But I am challenged to become more aware of the beauty of life, now.

"Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you."

Grief comes to all, it is a part of living. We all will face death, the loss of our beloved and the loss of our own lives.

"Really, I'd never been anything but terminal."

That could be said of us all.

This love story is coming to film this year. So it is a good time to read the book.