"I'll Give You the Sun" Blog 2

               When Jude was younger, all she wanted was to be loved and accepted by her peers. She just wanted to fit in with everyone else, but this changes as she gets older. When she’s older, after her mother has died, she wants to redeem herself from what she’s done. When her and her brother applied to art school, she threw his application away, and only sent her own. Her dead mother is very mad at her for this, and Jude wants to admit what she’s done to her brother and father, but is scared to. She has so much guilt, and she wants to be free from it.

                When Noah was younger, he just wanted to make his art, and have his sister back. His sister had changed so much in order to fit in and he missed how she used to be. When Noah got older, for a while, he wanted to fit in, but eventually, what he really wanted was to be with Brian and for his family to heal after the loss of his mother.

                What Oscar wants the most is to learn to control his impulses. He is clean from drugs but his behavior is still very impulsive and irresponsible. He wants to have a relationship with Jude, but he is scared that he won’t be able to handle a relationship. He seeks to find stability and to put his life back together.

                Noah and Jude’s father just wants to understand what had happened with their mother. Before she died, she had him move out and live in an apartment, but didn’t tell him the true reason why. And, Noah had told him that she had been driving to his apartment to tell him she wanted him to move back in and for the family to be together again, when she had gotten into a car accident. This was a lie but Noah wanted to protect his father from the truth, that she wanted a divorce. Their father just couldn’t cope with her death, and he didn’t understand why she would be coming to ask him to move back in. It didn’t make sense.

                What Brian wants, is a baseball scholarship. He’s worried if his baseball team finds out he is gay, that they will bully him and kick him off the team, and he won’t get a scholarship. He really just wants to not have to worry. He would like to just be accepted as he is, but he doesn’t think it’s possible, so he wants to make sure nobody ever knows about him being gay, and he does everything he can to hide it.

                Some themes that are beginning to appear in the book are the importance of family and mending relationships, overcoming a painful past, learning to forgive oneself, and the power guilt and regret can have over a person.

                The book structure is pretty interesting. Every other chapter switches between Noah and Jude telling the story. Noah tells the story from when he and Jude were 13 and 14. Jude tells the story when they are 16. Since the chapters alternate, the book goes back and forth like this, it goes from the past to present and back to the past. It’s a bit strange, but it’s cool to see how the story lays out that way. 

"I'll Give You the Sun" Blog 1

                The major characters in "I'll Give you the Sun" are Noah, Jude, their mom and dad, Guillermo, Oscar and Brian. Noah and Jude are twins who have always been very close, but as they're getting older, they begin to resent each other. Both twins are artistic. Noah paints and Jude sculpts, but their mother took more of an interest in Noah's paintings, and neglected Jude. Their father seemed to favor Jude, and they always spent time together. Both twins were very jealous of the other. Jealous of how they each got more attention from one parent, and both were jealous of each other's artistic abilities because they worried the other twin was better than them. It makes me wonder why they never just confronted each other about these problems? They never confront the issues, they’re just passive aggressive and secretly do thigs to  mess with or sabotage the other. It reminds me on a book I read once called "Crossing". The main character, Xing, is having lots of problems dealing with his past, but never confronted the issues. He just let it eat him up on the inside, and it created a lot of issues.

Another main character, Guillermo comes in later, after Jude and Noah’s mother had died. He is a sculptor, and he sculpts with stone. Jude wants to sculpt her mother in stone because all her clay sculptures were destroyed, she claimed it was by her dead mother. She believes her mother is very mad at her, because Jude got into the art school, but not Noah, and her mother thinks Noah deserves to be in the school more. Guillermo is a very depressed character, and Jude barely convinced him to teach her. Oscar is a college student who Guillermo had found years before, and he had drug addictions. Guillermo gave him a place to live, but in return made Oscar go to therapy to deal with his drug addictions. Jude becomes interested in Oscar. Brian is a boy who moved into a house on Noah’s street. Brian and Noah become best friends, but Noah secretly likes him. Later in the book, I found out Brian likes Noah back, but is terrified of anyone finding out about it. It reminds me of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” where Patrick is gay, but is so afraid of people knowing because he doesn’t want to get bullied, so he hides it.