This week's novel is The Sun is Also a Star, contemporary YA by Nicola Yoon. This one was a Goodreads Choice nominee for YA fiction in 2016, and it's been sitting on my to-read list for a while.
Natasha is into science and facts, and she's going to be deported back to Jamaica this evening. Daniel believes in fate and poetry, but his Korean parents want him to go to Yale and be a doctor or else. Daniel believes fate introduced him to Natasha, and Natasha does not have time to fall in love because she has twelve hours to figure out how to stay in the country.
The thing that grabbed me most about this book was how Natasha loves science. She loves talking about stars and parallel universes and black holes. She's into the flashy, fun stuff that high school science nerds love. She's into the stuff that entices you in: the beautiful false-color pictures of nebulae and looking smart while you explain everything you know about quarks. I relate so hard to where she is in her relationship with science--the shiny honeymoon phase. She hasn't figured out that there's a disconnect between what makes kids into science and the daily work of scientists. Natasha talks about how she wants to be a data scientist because it's practical, but I bet she has not yet run a single Monte Carlo simulation. She probably thinks Schrodinger's equation looks "elegant" and hasn't had to actually crank out those integrals yet. Not that Monte Carlos aren't great, they're just disconnected from the stuff NASA PR shows to get people excited about space. This part of Natasha felt real, and it made me nostalgic.
The way the book is structured is also pretty neat. The chapters are all very short, usually less that three pages. Mostly they alternate between Natasha's POV and Daniel's POV. But then it will mix it up with a 3rd person essay about the history of how black hair-care stores came to be owned mostly by Koreans or the etymology of the word "irie." These widen the story up to give some context, to make the story broader, but, partitioned off in their own short chapters, they never feel like info dumps. Also, every so often, there will be a chapter from a side character's POV. At one point, early in the story, Natasha is nearly hit by a car. The next chapter is from the driver's POV and explains why he was driving recklessly. It's not given as an excuse, but as an explanation. Every seemingly insignificant character who affects Natasha or Daniel's lives have lives of their own that they don't guess or even think about.
These do a lot of work to point out that no one is putting themselves in each other's shoes. No one is thinking about what Natasha's going through. No one's thinking that maybe the security guard is having a bad day. When these chapters pop up, it's always a little jarring. Wait, that guy has a backstory?
But it also it works with the theme of destiny and a million tiny variables working to bring Natasha and Daniel together. Daniel goes on about fate a lot, much to Natasha's annoyance, and Natasha talks about how the variables are all chance. These side chapters don't really answer which one of them is right, but they could be used as evidence for both of them. They met because she was nearly hit by a car, because the driver was drinking, because his teenage daughter died.
No comments:
Post a Comment