The Sky is Everywhere Review

The Sky is Everywhere

Jandy Nelson

Dial Books

March 2010

4/5

Quotes:

"The sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet."

“My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That's just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don't get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.”

“How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all the time. Every day. Every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn. Families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds. For years. For their whole lives. I don't believe time heals. I don't want it to. If I heal, doesn't that mean I've accepted the world without her?”  

“All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings – they’re gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.”  

Liked!
view quote

“When he plays
all the flowers swap colors
and years and decades and centuries
of rain pour back into the sky”

Jandy Nelson has recently received a lot of attention for her sophomore novel, "I'll Give You The Sun." I decided to start with her debut novel before I get to that one. I found this book to be very powerful and filled with many different emotions. It was a pleasant read for me that has made me all the more excited to read her latest. This book is still relatively heavy in terms of the subject. I've just read a ton of YA books recently about death so I think it's time for me to take a break from that for a little while anyway. If you are like me and live under a rock and somehow missed this one, definitely seek it out and read it!

Lennon is a bookworm and band geek who is dealing with the recent abrupt death of her big sister Bailey. Now Lennie is forced to pick up the pieces and keep going on with her life. However, she feels guilty to experience happiness when her sister no longer can. So she starts spending time with her sister's longtime boyfriend Toby, who is the one person that seems to be struggling just as much as she is. Then she meets Joe Fontaine, a new boy who was living in Paris, and who has serious musical talents. Lennie has to make the choice if she wants to be happy and start fresh with Joe, or stay in the darkness with Toby. 

I instantly loved Lennon due to her name, she's named after John Lennon because her mother was a total hippie. We learn this information because Joe is the only person who questions it and I love that he starts calling her that. Other things I love about Lennon include: her love of books, her passion for music, and the poems that she writes and leaves in random places. Lennie only has two main parent type figures: her Gram and Uncle Big since her father isn't in the picture and her mom left when the girls were little. I didn't like Toby at all, but I did understand that grief is something that connects people so it's natural that he turned to Lennon as a comfort with Bailey gone. I can't stand love triangles, and this was really no exception but I felt like it was automatically obvious that she wouldn't end up with Toby.

There is so much to say about Joe Fontaine, he's just one of those totally swoon worthy characters that you come across every now and then. He's a genuinely good guy and I love that his feelings for Lennon were so clear from the beginning. There was no game going on between them where neither would admit to liking the other, she learns pretty early on that he likes her. I adored that music was a huge connection for them and I loved that he would write music for her to play so it could be a duet between them. I think that he's the perfect guy for Lennon since he has so much brightness and happiness radiating from him the entire time and she desperately needed that as she dealt with her grief.

It's a beautiful story from start to finish. The main reason I give it a four is because of Toby, yes it made sense why it was there, but there were a few things about the intensity of the relationship that I wasn't a huge fan of. It was unfair for her to do that to Joe, especially when she is aware of his feelings for her (mild spoiler alert) and that he's been hurt before. Nelson's writing is just so realistic and I loved how poetic it was. It was different from many books I've read about grief, and it's insanely memorable and fascinating.