The Sun Is Also A Star by Nicola Yoon

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.”

          Two people bumping into each other on the street is a minor collision in the gran-scheme universe. What happens afterwards? A 2016 finalist for the National Book Award, The Sun Is Also A Star will have you believing in fate, love, and the ways the universe connects all of us.

Nicola Yoon

Celebrate World Read Aloud Day with My Father's Dragon

Looking for a great book to read aloud to your child this World Read Aloud Day? My Father's Dragon is an excellent choice.

First published in 1948 by Random House, My Father’s Dragon is now in its 68th year, and received the Newbery Honor Award that same year. Written by Ruth Stiles Gannett and illustrated by her step-mother, Ruth Chrisman Gannett, My Father’s Dragon and the two subsequent books in the series, Elmer and the Dragon and The Dragons of Blueland, are some of the best read-aloud stories in children’s literature.

My Father’s Dragon is the story of Elmer Elevator (the narrator’s father), and how he runs away to Wild Island on the advice of a talking cat, who says, “in my younger days I was quite a traveler.” The old alley cat tells Elmer of a baby dragon with blue and gold stripes who fell out of the sky, and is made to ferry passengers on Wild Island. Elmer stows away on a ship to Cranberry, taking along with him “chewing gum, two dozen pink lollipops, a package of rubber bands, black rubber boots, a compass, a tooth-brush and a tube of tooth paste, six magnifying glasses, a very sharp jackknife…” along with “twenty-five peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and six apples, because that’s all the apples he could find in the pantry.” Elmer is going to rescue Boris the dragon.

Elmer’s journey takes him to the Island of Tangerina (where tangerines grow everywhere) and eventually he makes it to Wild Island, but getting to the dragon becomes even more difficult once on the island. The black and white pencil illustrations are whimsical and once you finish reading My Father’s Dragon, it will be necessary to continue reading Elmer and the Dragon and The Dragons of Blueland. Celebrate World Read Aloud Day by reading this story.

This article originally appeared in The Clarion Ledger.