The Sun Is Also a Star

by Nicola Yoon

[Angie]

I loved the description and title of The Sun is Also a Star, but I was not expecting to love the book as much as I did. Holy crap! It basically shoved a bunch of my favorite tropes together then made me cry like a baby. Natasha and her family are about to get deported. They moved to America from Jamaica nine years ago, but her father got a DUI and the government caught up with them. Natasha doesn’t want to leave, and she’s not going to stop looking for some way to stay. Meanwhile, Daniel has an interview with a Yale alum. That’s not so bad, but he wants to be a poet not a doctor, and his traditional Korean parents will hear nothing of it. Natasha and Daniel meet and their whole lives are thrown off balance (or set back to balance).

The Sun is Also a Star had me hooked from the moment that I realized the entire thing was going to be set during one day. Well, it’s more like 12 hours. This is one of my favorite story-telling devices! The story starts with Natasha heading to USCIS to plead her family’s case one last time and Daniel having breakfast. It ends with them…well, it ends that night which is when Natasha’s flight leaves. Is she on it? I won’t tell. But I loved seeing the ins and outs of their day together. There’s fun stuff and serious stuff, but everything adds up to their lives being changed. Then that epilogue happened and I just burst into tears at the sight of one name. Yes, I did. It was quite an intense emotional reaction.

One fun thing about The Sun is Also a Star is that it’s not just Natasha and Daniel’s POVs. There are chapters from other people’s POVs too. They’re not major characters, but their presence does play a role and has an effect on our main characters’ lives. We don’t live in a vacuum. Outside forces can change the course of our day even if we don’t notice them at the time. Similarly, small actions by us that we don’t notice can have a huge impact on someone else. I absolutely loved getting all of these little details and then seeing them in action during the main chapters. Fate or coincidence? Both?

I really loved The Sun is Also a Star. Immigration and deportation is not a subject that I’ve read much about, and I think the author did an amazing job of laying out exactly what was going on with Natasha’s family (and many, many real families). I also loved how there was a lot of focus on family. Natasha and Daniel are both having trouble with theirs, and most of it has to do with them finding their own way rather than staying on the path that their parents set them on. Of course, the romance was absolutely adorable. It was a bit odd at first how convinced Daniel was that they’d fall in love, but I believed that he believed that and just rolled with it. Then, like I said, that epilogue which brings everything together and made me weep. Beautiful.

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.