Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Jandy Nelson's I’ll Give You the Sun. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.
I’ll Give You the Sun: Introduction
I’ll Give You the Sun: Plot Summary
I’ll Give You the Sun: Detailed Summary & Analysis
I’ll Give You the Sun: Themes
I’ll Give You the Sun: Quotes
I’ll Give You the Sun: Characters
I’ll Give You the Sun: Symbols
I’ll Give You the Sun: Theme Wheel
Brief Biography of Jandy Nelson
Historical Context of I’ll Give You the Sun
Other Books Related to I’ll Give You the Sun
- Full Title: I’ll Give You the Sun
- When Written: Early 2010s
- Where Written: San Francisco, CA
- When Published: 2015
- Literary Period: Contemporary
- Genre: Young adult fiction
- Setting: The fictional Northern California town of Lost Cove
- Climax: Oscar and Jude save Noah from drunkenly diving off of Devil’s Drop, the highest cliff in their hometown of Lost Cove, sparking a period of reconciliation between the estranged twins and the revelation of a mountain of secrets that have piled up between them.
- Protagonist/Antagonist: Twins Jude and Noah Sweetwine are, throughout the text, both the protagonists of their own stories and one another’s antagonists. In their alternating point-of-view chapters, Jude and Noah wrestle with their intimate but complicated relationship.
- Point of View: First person, alternating between Jude and Noah’s perspectives
Extra Credit for I’ll Give You the Sun
The Namesake. The character of Guillermo Garcia, the fiery and unpredictable “rock star” of the sculpture world who hails originally from Colombia, may or may not be named for one of Jandy Nelson’s literary idols, the famed Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez.
Locked In. Nelson revealed in an interview with Publishers Weekly that in order to give Jude and Noah their distinctive, almost otherworldly voices, she composed the book alone in a dark room wearing earplugs, with the only light coming from her laptop. After writing Noah’s timeline all the way through, she closed the file containing those pages and began a new one containing Jude’s perspective, refusing to look back at Noah’s for notes. She wanted to keep the characters as isolated from one another in her mind as they were in the story in order to provide authentic emotion and drama.