The Sun is also a Star—by Nicola Yoon

I learned about this novel, meant for Young Adults, from a list for best books of the year. Having never read a novel geared towards Young Adults, I whet my curiosity with this one. The premise is irresistible and fresh. The two central characters—Daniel, a Korean American teen and Natasha, an offspring of Jamaican immigrants in America—each set out to accomplish a very specific goal of varying complexities and consequences.

Daniel dreams in poetry and teems with individuality and idealism as he sets out on an unpleasant errand to satisfy his conventional, disciplinarian parents. His against-the-grain ideals have taken a harsher turn in probability with his over-achieving brother returning home as a failure in his parents’ eyes. The stakes are higher for Daniel to not conform to filial obligations and wishes.

Natasha, a proper teen with a penchant for pragmatism and Science, is bent on saving her family from deportation caused by a drunken episode by her troubled father. Beside her unwillingness to leave America, the only country she has ever known as home, she meditates on her parents’ bitter marriage and struggle to achieve the American dream. She needs to make a last ditch effort to plead her case with an influential immigration lawyer.

While the back cover profiles will have you pessimistic about opposites attracting in a magical setting, the novel achieves what many romantic stories fail to understand. Romance is hard to portray in a story. To show that two people are driven towards each other, their connection must be well-earned and organic; not slapped together by plot machinations. This is harder still to pull off in a short novel with a ticking-clock premise. Without setting up their personal histories and the underpinnings of their unique worlds we cannot buy into them caring for each other. Yet, all these concerns are believably and palpably resolved by Nicola Yoon’s spare and specific details.

The supporting characters of the parents, her ex, and his sibling are all given enough room to breathe themselves to life with their own backstories and yearnings. While relatable on a universal level, the two main characters leap off the page with their uniqueness and vulnerability for this inconvenient love that blossomed in the middle of a hectic day.

The tension and drama ratchet up gradually and believably without any derivative plot. The purity of human longing rings out across personality, culture, and race barriers for the central characters. What is more remarkable is the novel achieves this for the audience across those barriers as well and beyond the Young Adult intended audience. I have not been this caught up in a novel’s romance in a long time. The climax is the only part that felt a bit rushed like a novel summary, but what the novel achieves by the time we get to the climax is certainly laudable.

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