This is the longest stretch I’ve gone all year without finishing a book. I mostly blame baseball – my beloved Washington Nationals made an unprecedented postseason run from the Wild Card game to the World Series, surviving several elimination games and beating the odds to win the pennant. We are a baseball house, which meant late nights throughout October and much exhaustion and distraction during the days. My reading ground to a halt. I stopped and started about 4 books, getting nowhere, before finally just accepting that I was not going to be getting any reading done until the end of the Series.
Another reason for the inactivity: the one book I was reading/listening to just wasn’t doing it for me. For the “Movie in 2019” category of the 2019 EDIWTB Reading Challenge, I chose I’ll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson, a YA novel that I JUST DISCOVERED IS NOT COMING OUT AS A MOVIE IN 2019. OH MY GOD. How did that happen? I can’t believe I read this book for no reason. I may have confused it with another book? It is in development, but no release date has been set. WHY DID I READ THIS BOOK? I may just give myself a pass on this because I truly believed it was coming out this year. My blog, my challenge, right?
I’ll Give You The Sun is about twins in Northern California – Noah and Jude – who used to be inseparable but became estranged between ages 14 1/2 and 16. The story of why they stopped speaking to each other unfolds throughout the book in alternating chapters, with the early years narrated by Noah and the later years narrated by Jude. In those intervening years, the two grapple with a lot of complicated things: sexual identity, death of a parent, competition between them for academics and their parents’ attention, sexual assault. It sounds like it should be an interesting book, and I am particularly drawn to books about twins because I am a twin mom, but I had a really hard time with this one.
Things happen in I’ll Give You The Sun that are implausible or make no sense. There are weird supernatural effects throughout, such as conversations with dead family members. Noah and Jude are totally self-absorbed, even for adolescents, and act in unforgivably selfish ways. There are inappropriate sexual relationships and underdeveloped characters who fall in deep love with little explanation. The plot was hard to follow. And, it was boring! It took me SO LONG to finish this book. And I didn’t enjoy it at all.
Maybe this is an age thing? People seem to love this book.
I alternated between listening to and reading I’ll Give You The Sun. It is narrated by the excellent Julia Whelan and Jesse Bernstein. I thought Bernstein in particular did a great job with Noah – I actually googled him because he was so convincing as a 14 year old and I wanted to see what he looked like. But even this duo couldn’t save I’ll Give You The Sun. I found my mind wandering as I listened to it – the death knell for an audiobook.
At least I completed one of the challenge categories… kind of.