Tuesday 18 October 2016

Review - "The Sun Is Also A Star"

The Sun Is Also A Star
by Nicola Yoon
rating:☆☆☆☆
published: 1st November 2016
spoilers? no

Goodreads

What I care about is you, and I'm sure that love is enough to overcome all the bullshit. And it is bullshit. All the handwringing. All the talk about cultures clashing or preserving cultures and what will happen to the kids. All of it is one hundred percent pure, unadulterated bullshit, and I just refuse to care.


Galley provided by publisher

This book made me tear up (and that's all I'm going to admit to!). The writing is so beautiful, and the characters were all amazing and nuanced and so real that I could even stand the instalove (which there is a lot of. I mean, it's the whole premise!).

There are a lot of different points of view in this one. The two main ones are Daniel and Natasha, but their sides of the story are interspersed with the points of view of several other side characters - Natasha's father, Daniel's father, Irene the security guard - all of which add to the story and make it that much better.

One of my favourite things about this book was that it subverts that "boys like science, girls like art" trope, which I really hate. Natasha was all into science and Daniel into poetry and this is honestly the kind of thing I love seeing. Every now and then there were interludes based on scientific concepts, and seriously, I am a sucker for science in books. Maybe one or two were a little simplified but that's understandable. And it didn't break up the flow of the book either; they slotted in easily.

On occasion, I found Daniel to be a little cringey (going on about all that meanttobe stuff, for example), and Natasha seemed, to begin with at least, a bit too invested in not being passionate and believing that doing art subjects was setting yourself up to fail, but then by the end she'd changed her tune (which was great character development, and I loved it, even if she did start heading down the Daniel cringeyness route).

Basically, it was great and I can't wait to read more of Nicola Yoon's books.

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