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The Sun Is Also a Star Is a Story of Love, Life, and Everything
Writing a truly great novel is an act of compassion, and Nicola Yoon’s The Sun Is Also a Star is one of the most empathetic, open-hearted YA books I’ve ever read. It speaks in many voices, not just those of its leads—Daniel, a dreamy Korean American teen on his way to an alumni interview, and Natasha, a girl on a last-minute mission to save her family from deportation to Jamaica—but those of their family members, and of the people who have bit parts in their love story: a paralegal and her boss, a drunk driver, a waitress. Like Yoon’s debut, Everything, Everything, Sun is about the sucker punch of love at first(ish) sight, but explored on a macro scale. She digs deep into the crazy stew of chemicals and coincidence that put two people in the right place at the exact right time, then explores everything that conspired to put them there: chance, yes, but also history and chemistry and the hell of other people.
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Natasha and Daniel first spot each other at a record store. Daniel has a poet’s nature, and he falls for her from the start. Natasha, a born skeptic, is distracted by her family’s impending deportation, reluctant to be snowed by an intensely passionate boy on the most momentous day of her life.
But soon they’re setting off on an epic stop-and-go romance all stuffed into a single day that might be Natasha’s last in the U.S. They go to a coffee shop, visit Daniel’s father’s store, hit a karaoke bar, take in the view from an NYC rooftop. Mostly, they talk. They test each other, push each other, draw each other in. Love stories have been set in New York before, but not like this: Yoon repeatedly jumps out of Daniel’s and Natasha’s heads, switching to the perspectives of the people who surround, enable, and hinder their story. In doing so she transforms her book into an empathetic, chaotic tapestry of New York City, life, and everything, interspersing it with meditations on love and fate, good hair and the multiverse.
The book takes you to Korea, to Jamaica, forward and backward in time. If Natasha and Daniel are the story’s sun, the rest of the book lights up around them like stars—a galaxy of people, concepts, moments of connection or rejection. It’ll make you more alert and aware. It’ll make you lift your head up from your own story for a moment, remember we’re all surrounded by a sea of them.
How can a love story like this end? A love story between two people on the eve of being ripped apart? Does Yoon stick the landing?
She does. By expanding the book’s world, its timeline, and even, arguably, the conventions of YA lit, she creates an ending that’s worthy of both her characters and the delicacy of her concept. After seeing in Everything, Everything what she’s able to do within the confines of one small, sterile house, it comes as no surprise that, with all of New York as her canvas, she has created a truly epic love story.
The Sun Is Also a Star is available now.