"I'll Give You the Sun" Blog 4

           Of all the book choices on the list, I chose this book because it had good reviews, and I really liked the title. I found books that looked good and had interesting titles and looked into them. “I’ll Give You the Sun” had the best reviews so I chose it. The title sounds really beautiful to me, which is what drew me to it initially, because you’d have to really, really love somebody to give them the sun.

            I didn’t have many connections to the book, but one thing I could connect to was when Noah saw his sister change so much just to fit in with the wrong crowd. I’ve seen some of my close friends completely betray who they were and their morals just to fit in with the “in crowd.” I can understand how much this upset Noah because he really loves and cares about his sister.

            I would recommend this book to people who have experienced family tragedies, like losing a family member. This book is about a family who loses their mother, and how they cope with it, and maybe it could help comfort them. I also might recommend it to someone who is artistic, because it’s also about how the twins use their art to cope and they pour their emotions into their art.

"I'll Give You the Sun" Blog 3

            “The very moment I put hammer to chisel with the intention of finding NoahandJude, my mind goes to the day Noah almost drowned.

            Mom had just died. I was at the sewing machine with Grandma Sweetwine, one of her very first visits. I was working on the seam of a dress, when it’s like the room shook me, that’s the only way I can describe it. Grandma said: Go, only it was more like a tornado blowing the world at me. I flew out of my chair, out of the window, slid all the way down the bluff, my feet touching the sand as Noah hit the water. He didn’t come up. I knew he wasn’t going to. I’ve never been scared like that before, not even when Mom died. There was boiling liquid in my veins.

            I ram the chisel with the hammer, watch a corner of the stone break off, watching myself rush into the surf that winter day. I swam fast as a shark despite my clothes, then started diving down where he sank, gripping armful after armful of water, trying to think about currents and riptides and maelstroms and everything Dad had ever taught me. I let the rip take me, dove down again, up and down, until there was Noah floating faceup, alive, but not conscious. I dragged him to shore, swimming one-armed, sinking more every stroke with the weight of him, both our lives pounding inside me, and then on the beach, I beat his sternum with shaking hands, blew breath after terrified breath into his cold clammy mouth, and when he revived, the second I knew he was okay, I slapped him as hard as I could across the face.

            Because how could he have done this?

How could he have chosen to leave me here all alone?

            He told me he hadn’t been trying to kill himself, but I didn’t believe him.”

            I chose this passage from the book from when Jude was carving a stone sculpture of her and Noah together. Her instructor, Guillermo, had told her that she would find in the rock, what she could find in her heart. So, to put emotion into her work, she recalled the story of the only time in her life when she had been in the world without Noah. This was when he had drowned and almost died. She was terrified because, since they are twins, they had always been there for each other, and she didn’t want to lose him.

            When Jude talks about how it was one of her grandmother’s “very first visits,” she means one of her very first visits from the dead. Her grandmother’s ghost visited her after she died, and it was one the first times that had happened.

            Noah was trying to kill himself because everything had seemed to go wrong. His mother had died, his family was torn up and he loved a boy he didn’t think would ever love him back.