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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Nov 2016, 384 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2019, 384 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Rebecca Foster
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Be the first to read the dazzling new novel from Nicola Yoon, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Everything, Everything.
Natasha: I'm a girl who believes in science and facts. Not fate. Not destiny. Or dreams that will never come true. I'm definitely not the kind of girl who meets a cute boy on a crowded New York City street and falls in love with him. Not when my family is twelve hours away from being deported to Jamaica. Falling in love with him won't be my story.
Daniel: I've always been the good son, the good student, living up to my parents' high expectations. Never the poet. Or the dreamer. But when I see her, I forget about all that. Something about Natasha makes me think that fate has something much more extraordinary in store - for both of us.
The Universe: Every moment in our lives has brought us to this single moment. A million futures lie before us. Which one will come true?
It does no harm to the romance of
the sunset to know a little about it.
— Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
— The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot
Prologue
CARL SAGAN SAID
that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. When he says "from scratch," he means from nothing. He means from a time before the world even existed. If you want to make an apple pie from nothing at all, you have to start with the Big Bang and expanding universes, neutrons, ions, atoms, black holes, suns, moons, ocean tides, the Milky Way, Earth, evolution, dinosaurs, extinction level events, platypuses, Homo erectus, Cro-Magnon man, etc. You have to start at the beginning. You must invent fire. You need water and fertile soil and seeds. You need cows and people to milk them and more ...This is a charming and unusual teen romance that readers of John Green and David Arnold will love. The one-day setting is a great plot setup that lends urgency to the love story. The book loses momentum a bit in the middle while the teens look for ways to kill time in the city, and I wasn't sure how I felt about the ending, which again makes reference to the multiverse theory. But overall it's a sweet and enjoyable novel you're sure to race through...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
Nicola Yoon's The Sun Is Also a Star is an example of a circadian novel where the main action (except flashbacks, for instance) takes place all on one day. The most celebrated example is James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), set in 1904 Dublin on what has come to be known as "Bloomsday," June 16th. The protagonist, Leopold Bloom, mostly wanders the streets of his city: attending a funeral, arguing in a pub, and so on. The Sixteenth of June (2014) by Maya Lang recreates the format of Ulysses in a near-contemporary story set in Philadelphia.
Three years after Ulysses came another famous circadian novel, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925). On this average day in London the title character, high-society housewife Clarissa Dalloway, quietly ...
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Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
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