I’ll Give You the Sun Themes

The emotional core of Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You the Sun is the intimate but paralyzing bond between Noah and Jude Sweetwine, thirteen-year-old fraternal twins coming of age in the Northern California town of Lost Cove. When readers first meet Noah and Jude, the twins are extremely codependent. They can sense each other’s emotions, they play strange theoretical thought games (including one in which they divvy up parts of the world such as the…

Noah and Jude, the twin protagonists of the novel, are both artists. Throughout the book, Nelson shows how the siblings’ respective relationships to their art grows and changes alongside their relationships with themselves and one another. Noah at thirteen years old is the proprietor of his own “invisible museum”—he can hardly restrain himself from painting and drawing either on paper or in his mind everything and everyone he sees. Jude, meanwhile, is…

Nelson’s electrifying language and her protagonists’ shared preoccupation with the supernatural elevates the main story of I’ll Give You the Sun into an almost mythic level. Jude and Noah believe that their mother, Dianna, is a “blow-in” from another world or another planet, and their desperate love for her is reflected in how they see her as a supernatural being, even after her death. Meanwhile, their deceased Grandma Sweetwine may or may not pay…

In I’ll Give You the Sun, feelings of love and sexual longing crop up on almost every page. As Jude and Noah come of age, they wrestle with feelings of embarrassment related to their newly minted sexualities. The adults, too, wrestle with conflicting desires and painful romances: in Noah’s timeline, Dianna’s relationship with Noah and Jude’s dad Benjamin dissolves, while in Jude’s timeline, her sculpture mentor Guillermo Garcia mourns the failure of a recent…