I'll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson

Oh dear. This is one of these books that I keep putting off writing about. The problem is that it was a perfectly pleasant and easy read, but it didn't really spark anything in my head, didn't connect any two ideas I want to pull out, didn't piss me off so I want to rant. I just...it was fine? Better than fine, even, although I also never felt as emotionally connected to the book as I felt like I was supposed to. I felt like this was supposed to be a tearjerker, but nary a tear was jerked.

Maybe I'm just too old for this kind of YA. It's better written that some I've read! The conflicts are real conflicts, and could not be solved by two people just talking to each other. I mean, some of them could be alleviated by that, but not solved, and the reasons for withholding information were better than "because the plot demands you be kept in the dark." I hate that so much, and I've seen too much of it recently. (I'm looking at YOU, Queen of the Tearling.)

And I remember enough of being a teenager to get it that everything is  hard, and you don't know who you are and it's all the angst, and hurt, and hurting each other because you don't have enough social skills to get out of situations otherwise. I get feeling that if you don't get this opportunity right here, the world is over.

While I remember that, oof, I don't really want to spend any more time there. I did my years of teenagehood, and I'm much happier as an adult. And yet, Nelson does a good job of capturing something about adolescence, and her characters are really solid.

We have here a pair of twins, Noah and Jude. They are very close, but are growing apart, and Noah deals with self-loathing around his sexuality, while Jude explores hers in ways that make her mother unhappy. They're both artistic, Noah drawing and Jude sculpting, and there's also a contest there for capturing their mother's attention and approval. Their mother is a flawed character, whimsical, loving, but capricious and somewhat self-centered. And she's missing for half the book - stylistically, the book is broken up into chapters Noah narrates in the past, and chapters Jude narrates, in the future, three years after the death of their mother in a car crash.

Both have information they haven't told each other, but it's less "let's slow down the plot and create false tension" and more "I don't know how to say this so I don't," and I was much happier with that. Both twins have ended up doing hurtful things to each other, some on purpose, some through misunderstanding. Their father is present but hurting as well after the loss of his wife, and confused over what was going on before that.

There's a streak of magical realism in here - Jude follows her grandmother's "Bible," a collection of spells and folklore to the letter, and thinks her mother's ghost is breaking all her pottery sculptures. Noah seems to be able to delay his leaps over a cliff in mid-air. But it's there more as flavour than any real point to the book.

Of course, since it's about the loss of a parent, I find myself doing what I always do these days - assess it against my own experiences. This one wasn't terrible. It didn't make me angry. It didn't touch me deeply either. There's something about this book that never let me forget it was a book, whereas something like Miriam Toews' All My Puny Sorrows gutted me with how real it felt. It's not bad. I didn't mind reading it. I just am left feeling a little empty at the end.