I'll Give You The Sun - Jandy Nelson

Gut Instinct Rating - 3

Characters - 2.5

Believability for type

and topics - 3.5

Similarity to other books - 5

Writing Style - 3

Excitement Factor - 3.5

Story Line - 4

Title Relevance - 4.5

Dust Jacket Art - 3

Goodreads users gave this book a 4.15. I think it was more deserving of a 3.56.

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Published in 2014

Pages: 371

Publishing Company: Dial Books

Number of books by author: 3 Books

Genre: YA Fiction

This book was just another bad start to the month... or in this case, end to the month. (I've been so MIA in the land of books it's ridiculous. August left a bad taste in my mouth, and so I went on a hiatus, and this isn't a great way to get back to it.) I would not recommend I'll Give You The Sun. And I might be the only person who tells you that. I thought the characters were simply annoying. Both the twins were the same characters - whine, whine whine, was simply the first and main component to each of their personality traits. But even worse was that they even called themselves and the author out on the inability to be innovative! They simply reversed the characters story lines from popular to invisible... seriously?! You can't even be creative? You're that lazy? What a waste of writing space. And to think the Acknowledgements page starts with the book taking a long time to write. It's a miracle the editor found this to be entertaining. The father and mother mimicked these behaviors... it was like reading about the same characters only grown up. If I wasn't so interested in what happened with Brian and Noah, I probably wouldn't have read on. It was only so believable. Quite honestly, the ending became predictable and it wasn't all that believable, which was sort of a letdown. I wanted the scenario with the mom to have more to it. I would've liked to see it happen sooner in the story line instead of us witnessing the first 200 pages happen repeatedly. The story line was pretty boring for the first 175 pages and then there was a little pick-up around those last 175 pages, but really... not until the last 75-100 pages did we get something real entertaining. The writing style itself was really jumpy. The chapters were long and extended, and they didn't really make sense half the time, nor were they necessary. For a book that could've been really powerful, it had so much information that was just so unnecessary. I mean, we read about stuff that was 25% filler, and I'm all about a fulfilling story, but that's a lot of filling. Sadly, I've read Colleen Hoover's Confession and I loved all the artwork that was actually visible in that book and I wanted that here. It surely would've made it less unique and I probably would've said, "But it was already done!" and given it a four, but I wanted that. I hated all the "(Self Portrait: ______)" stuff listed throughout the book. I would've much rather seen the imagery. The title and imagery were both fine, but otherwise, this book was just barely hanging onto its 3.5 star rating.