The Sun
Is Also A Star by Nicola Yoon (author of Everything, Everything) is one of the most stunning books that I
have read this year. It is a love story, it is an immigration story, it is a
story of two people, and yet, a story of the universe.
The
entire story takes place throughout the span of a day—less than 24 hours in New
York City. The story alternates between Natasha Kingsley and Daniel Jae Ho Bae,
with a few other points of view along the way. Natasha is an immigrant from Jamaica.
She has lived in the United States for most of her life. On her last day in the
United States, the day The Sun Is Also A
Star takes place, she is trying all that she can to stop her family’s
deportation back to Jamaica. Daniel, on the other hand, is a first generation
Korean-American, meaning that his parents moved to the United States, and he
has full citizenship. On the day he meets Natasha, he is on his way to a
college interview, so he can become a doctor at Yale like his parents want.
What he wants is to write poetry.
The Sun Is Also A Star is a novel that
examines all the tiny ways in which human lives collide, and the way in which
your actions can create a ripple effect. Natasha, a budding scientist, believes
in “observable facts.” She thinks that love is just a series of chemical
reactions. But when she meets Daniel, she has to admit that maybe there is
something more.
The Sun Is Also A Star is a beautiful
and very real examination of the immigrant experience. How immigrants,
especially, know that their lives turn out differently than what they expected.
People leave behind homes and family for a strange land where the language is
unfamiliar. They can only hope they are allowed to stay and not be deported. They
can only hope for a better life for their family. The future is not foreseeable,
but every action has a consequence. Loving, even for a short amount of time, is
better than not loving at all.
“They have a sense that the length
of a day is mutable, and you can never see the end from the beginning. They
have a sense that love changes all things all the time.
That’s what love is for.”
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