*Starred Review* When Noah's mom suggests that he and his twin sister, Jude, apply to a prestigious arts high school, he is elated, but Jude starts simmering with jealousy when it becomes clear that their mother favors Noah's work. Noah soaks up the praise, though a little callously, happy to hone his painting skills and focus on the guy across the street, who could be more than a friend. Fast-forward three years, and everything is in pieces. Their mother has died in a car crash, and Noah, who wasn't accepted to art school, has given up painting, while Jude, who was accepted but is no longer the shimmering, confident girl she once was, is struggling in her sculpture class. All her clay forms shatter in the kiln; is her mother's ghost the culprit? Determined to make a piece that her mother can't ruin, Jude seeks out the mentorship of a fiery stone carver (and his alluring model, Oscar). Nelson structures her sophomore novel brilliantly, alternating between Noah's first-person narrative in the years before the accident and Jude's in the years following, slowly revealing the secrets the siblings hide from each other and the ways they each throw their hearts into their artwork. In an electric style evoking the highly visual imaginations of the young narrators, Nelson captures the fraught, antagonistic, yet deeply loving relationship Jude and Noah share.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2014 Booklist

In her much-anticipated second book, Nelson (The Sky Is Everywhere, rev. 3/10) delivers another novel of romance, tragedy, grief, and healing, told in poetic prose with the barest hint of magical realism. Jude and Noah are fraternal twins; once very close, they now hardly speak to each other. The reasons for their estrangement gradually come to light over the course of the novel through the twins' alternating voices from different points in time. Thirteen-year-old Noah narrates the story's beginnings; an extremely talented painter, bullied for being gay, he finds himself attracted to the new boy next door. The later story is revealed from sixteen-year-old Jude's point of view. Too focused on art school -- including why she was accepted and Noah wasn't -- to think about boys, and haunted by the tragic automobile-accident death of their mother, she finds solace in conversations with their grandmother's ghost. Despite some minor flaws -- Noah's voice never quite rings true as an adolescent male; and the present-tense stream-of-consciousness narrative occasionally dilutes the powerful imagery of the writing -- the novel remains a compelling meditation on love, grief, sexuality, family, and fate. jonathan hunt (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

"I'LL GIVE YOU THE SUN," the second novel by the talented Jandy Nelson, author of "The Sky Is Everywhere," is told from the alternating perspectives of teenage fraternal twins, a boy and girl named Noah and Jude, each of them narrating from a different side of the accident that forever changed their lives. On one level, the book is about duality: As Jude and Noah wrangle over who will go to a prestigious art school and vie for attention and approbation and even, for a short time, the affections of the same boy, each narrator struggles to become whole, to become something other than merely half of one. Although Nelson portrays the relationship between the twins, their oneness, as comforting, more often it is claustrophobic - perhaps contributing to the book's tense, almost breathless feel. One of their favorite games is to divide up the world between them, choosing and bartering the sun or the trees or the oceans. There is the sense that the world is simply not big enough for both of them. Later, as Jude and Noah swap identities, family roles, and even favorite parents, they come up against the failure of dichotomies, of moral absolutes. Good and bad, freak and normal - oppositional labels can't describe or define their experiences, and the book makes us see the pluralities that are everywhere. "We grapple with the mysteries, each in our own way," Jude reflects toward the novel's end, "and some of us get to float around on one of them and call it home." Nelson even leaves ambiguous the limits of reality itself, letting us wonder whether the ghost of the twins' grandmother - a wonderful and whimsical character who occasionally drops in on Jude to deliver a perfectly timed witticism or bit of advice - is really a phantom or merely a projection of Jude's desires. It's an omission that in the hands of another writer might instead seem coy or even lazy, but in Nelson's book seems a deliberate choice to celebrate the beauty of the mysterious. Above all, Jude and Noah learn that blame cannot be neatly assigned, and in this way "I'll Give You the Sun" is a true coming-of-age tale: It shows its protagonists moving from a black-and-white version of the world to one of infinite, sometimes uncomfortable, variegations. Noah's unfolding love story, and his thoughts and anxieties about being gay, are particularly touching. "Do guys normally stand so close to other guys?" he asks as he begins to fall in love. "I wish I'd paid more attention to these kinds of things before." Jude's romantic adventures are equally well drawn, and, perhaps most surprising, so are the novel's grown-ups. These include the twins' parents and the reclusive and mysterious sculptor Guillermo Garcia, who becomes Jude's mentor, and who we ultimately discover has a more intimate connection with her past. If I have a single complaint, it's about the speed with which these characters fire off revelations toward the end of the novel, frenetically uncovering deeper dimensions to their relationships and exposing new truths. But that's a quibble, and a testament, really, to Nelson's ability to build a suspenseful story not on plot devices but on the tightly coiled inner lives of her characters. On a line-by-line level, Nelson is bold, even breathtaking. You get the sense her characters are bursting through the words, breaking free of normal metaphors and constructions, jubilantly trying to rise up from the prison of language - much in the way that Jude describes Guillermo's work, or the way Michelangelo once described making a sculpture: "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." Nelson returns to this quotation several times, both commenting on and making manifest the struggle of the artist. Art - its creation, its importance, its impact on identity and freedom - is perhaps the central theme of "I'll Give You the Sun." The book celebrates art's capacity to heal, but it also shows us how we excavate meaning from the art we cherish, and how we find reflections of ourselves within it. I've always loved this line from Stendhal: "A novel is a mirror carried down a high road." Done well, it shows us ourselves even as it moves us forward into new places and new understandings. "I'll Give You the Sun" is a dazzling mirror, and many grateful teenagers are sure to find themselves reflected in and learning from its pages. LAUREN OLIVER'S first novel for adults, "Rooms," has just been published.

This engrossing coming-of-age novel of artistic twins Noah and Jude unfolds in an unusual way: the twins tell the story in alternating first-person chapters, but Noah's chapters take place when they're 13, and Jude's take place three years later, at age 16. In the intervening years, a tragedy has occurred, tangled up in a messy web of betrayals, lies, and secrets, which gradually reveal themselves. Bernstein and Whelan are both excellent narrators. As 13-year-old Noah, Bernstein conveys all the yearning, hope, and insecurity of an adolescent boy: the swooning highs and crushing heartbreak of first love, the worry of hiding the fact that he's gay, the need for parental approval, the fear of bullies, and the hope of getting into a prestigious arts school. Whelan's chapters take place in the aftermath of the tragedy and estrangement of the twins, and in her voice we hear all of Jude's self-loathing, guilt, and bitterness, and the hard shell she has constructed to shut out the world. Whelan is also pitch-perfect at voicing an English ex-junkie trying to put his life together. She can't quite manage a Spanish accent for the reclusive middle-aged artist whom Jude wants to be her mentor (the accent she attempts almost sounds Russian), but she does bring out his colorful personality: a fierce, passionate, desperate, eccentric artistic genius. This emotionally nuanced rendition of a memorable novel is highly recommended. Ages 14-up. A Dial hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Starred Review. Gr 9 Up-A resplendent novel from the author of The Sky Is Everywhere (Dial, 2010). Fraternal twins and burgeoning artists Jude and Noah are inseparable until puberty hits and they find themselves competing for boys, a spot at an exclusive art school, and their parents' affections. Told in alternating perspectives and time lines, with Noah's chapters taking place when they are 13 and Jude's when they are 16, this novel explores how it's the people closest to us who have the power to both rend us utterly and knit us together. Jude's takes are peppered with entries from her bible of superstitions and conversations with her grandmother's ghost, and Noah continuously imagines portraits (complete with appropriately artsy titles) to cope with his emotions. In the intervening years, a terrible tragedy has torn their family apart, and the chasm between the siblings grows ever wider. Vibrant imagery and lyrical prose propel readers forward as the twins experience first love, loss, betrayal, acceptance, and forgiveness. Art and wonder fill each page, and threads of magical realism lend whimsy to the narrative. Readers will forgive convenient coincidences because of the characters' in-depth development and the swoon-worthy romances. The novel's evocative exploration of sexuality, grief, and sibling relationships will ring true with teens. For fans of Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl (St. Martin's, 2013) and Melina Marchetta's realistic fiction. See author Q&A, p. 152.- Shelley Diaz, School Library Journal (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Twins Noah and Jude used to be NoahandJudeinseparable till betrayal and tragedy ripped them apart.Nelson tells her tale of grief and healing in separate storylines, one that takes place before their art-historian mother's fatal car accident and one that takes place after, allowing readers and twins to slowly understand all that's happened. An immensely talented painter, Noah is 13 1/2 in his thread, when Brian moves in next door to their coastal Northern California home. His intense attraction to Brian is first love at its most consuming. Jude is 16 in hers, observing a "boy boycott" since their mother's death two years earlier; she is also a sculpture student at the California School of the Artswhich, inexplicably, Noah did not get into. Haunted by both her mother and her grandmother, she turns to an eccentric sculptor for mentoring and meets his protg, a dangerously charismatic British college student. The novel is structurally brilliant, moving back and forth across timelines to reveal each teen's respective exhilaration and anguish but holding the ultimate revelations back until just the right time. Similarly, Nelson's prose scintillates: Noah's narration is dizzyingly visual, conjuring the surreal images that make up his "invisible museum"; Jude's is visceral, conveying her emotions with startling physicality. So successful are these elements that the overdetermined, even trite conclusion will probably strike readers as a minor bump in the road. Here's a narrative experience readers won't soon forget. (Fiction. 14 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.