The Sun is Also A Star by Nicola Yoon

• Release Date: November 1, 2016
• Pages: 384
• Genre: Contemporary
• Publisher: Crown (Random House)

Tasha Kingston’s family is 24 hours away from being deported to Jamaica after her father drunkenly tells a police officer they’ve been in the country for over a decade on expired travel visas. Tasha isn’t ready to leave America, she has a fake social security number and was prepared to go to college and become a data scientist. She resolves to spend her last day doing everything she can to find a way to delay the deportation. What she doesn’t plan on is meeting Daniel Bae, the idealistic aspiring poet  who believes their meeting was an act of faith. Tasha is pragmatic and doesn’t believe in fate or soul mates but as they spend the day together Daniel starts to change her mind and get inside her heart. But what does any of it mean when in 24 hours she won’t be allowed back in the United States ?

Honestly, I was kind of lukewarm on the romance, I just have a hard time investing in romances in such a condensed timeline. To me the most interesting thing about this book is how the story is structured. Not only do we get Daniel and Tasha’s POVs we also get these mini sections called “brief histories” that give you a minor characters past and future or give you a history on a certain subject. I liked the way these sections broadened the 24 hour timeline a little bit.

Maybe I’m getting old, but there were parts of this book that were just a little too earnest for me, especially with Daniel. I feel like his mean older brother was made almost manically mean just to be his foil. Daniel has a lot of angst about the fact that his parents want him to go to Yale when he just wants to be a poet and I don’t know I’m just like:

I mean…Yale has an English department

Okay, I’m going to talk about diversity for a second here. I think you can draw a straight line from the beginnings of We Need Diverse Books hashtag to a book like this getting so much great pre-release buzz. I think this book is what success and publishers “getting diversity” looks like. The Sun is Also A Star is about an interracial couple with two POCs that isn’t all about The Struggle and not really being marketed for it’s diversity; It’s being marketed for it’s  story. Books like this are pretty rare and I hope with her success we see more !

The Sun is Also A Star is  a book I think we will be hearing a lot about for a long time. It’s about first love, family and all the little coincidences that throw two people together in the right place at the wrong time.

This book has one of my Top 5 Title Drops.