a note: apologies for being such SHIT about posting the past few weeks. we’ve been, well, suffering.
Title and Author: The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon
Rating: 4 Michael Roths, with a side of Sweet Potato Fries
A Quote: “There’s a Japanese phrase that I like: koi no yokan. It doesn’t mean love at first sight. It’s closer to love at second sight. It’s the feeling when you meet someone that you’re going to fall in love with them. Maybe you don’t love them right away, but it’s inevitable that you will.”
Tl;dr (except you wr): This is absolutely SUPER YA (young adult, for the uninitiated). Take two seniors in high school: Natasha, a Jamaican realist who doesn’t believe in love, and Daniel, a Korean-American poet boi who wants nothing other than being in love and avoiding his Yale interview. They, through some fate-induced coincidence, meet and, over the course of the day, ~develop feelings~. And of course, the caveat: Natasha is being deported later that day. We, the reader, follow their journey into their relationship, questions of identity and immigration, and ideals of success.
The Rating explained: I have been doing a lot of ~adult reading~ lately, so picking up this book—a guaranteed feel-good book that had a cool cover—was an intentional choice. While, yes, those parts were delivered upon, I wasn’t expecting the book to hit me so hard in the core of my identity. Under all the love and ~feelings~ is a discussion about cultural identity, about race, about class and how it determines your immigrant experience. While that may not be so relatable to those who don’t have a hyphenated national identity, reading The Sun is Also a Star left me contemplating my own experiences more carefully. There were moments where I cringed, moments where I fell into a pit of feelings, and parts where I wanted—no, needed—to keep reading to see what was next.
Amount of sleep voluntarily lost during the reading of this book: I read most of this book while commuting from home to my internship over break, so honestly, not that much. Evidently, having a long commute does the trick to continuously read a book. It didn’t take too long to get through this book, so if you’re looking for a quick existential crisis, this is it.