The Sun is Also a Star

by Nicola Yoon

This YA book is about two teenagers in New York City and a day in their life.  A young Korean man who is being pushed to be a doctor by his parents and who is bullied by his older brother who got kicked out of Harvard, meets a Jamaican girl who is scheduled to be deported that day because her father got caught for DUI and the police discovered he and his family are illegal aliens.

Like the father in Paris by the Book, this father had dreams which have been thwarted.  He wants to be a successful actor but feels perhaps that having a family has hampered his success.  The young woman, his daughter, wants to stay in the U.S. and go to University so while her family is packing she makes more attempt to get their removal order overturned.

The boy notices the girl as she is walking down the street.  He is supposed to be taking a cash deposit to his father at the family's store, getting a haircut and preparing for an interview for admission to Yale.  Instead he starts following the girl and falling head over heels in love with her.  When he saves her from stepping off the curb and getting hit by a car they meet.  He tries to convince her to love him by asking her various questions from a website.  She says she only believes in science.

As the day goes on they become friendly and affectionate.  The girl sees a lawyer who tells her that he thinks he can get a judge to overturn her removal order.  Coincidentally it appears this lawyer was hit by the driver who almost hit the young girl.  The shock the lawyer received has made him realize he is in love with his secretary.  So instead of going to the judge he has sex with his secretary.  He later lies and tells the girl that the judge would not agree to the change.

He had planned to fire the secretary.  However when the Korean boy shows up at his office for his Yale interview and tells him how much he loves the girl and wants her to stay, the lawyer decides he must leave his wife for the secretary.

This means the two teens who have now fallen in love will not be able to stay together.  The boy accompanies her to the airport.  They keep in touch for a while but gradually drop contact.  The author had done a great job of building up the passion between the two kids from a one sided infatuation to mutual affection.  The girl kept trying to keep him away but he gradually won her over.  The innocence of the boy was well presented and the hard-nosed realism of the girl too.

The author does have an alternate ending where a decade later the two of them are on an airplane (together??).

The book makes one think about all the people we encounter as we go about our day.  We don't really notice them, pay attention to them and their stories.

The story was interesting. Each chapter was only two or three pages long, each written from the perspective of the boy or girl or other characters in the story.  It was an interesting way to develop the story.  Of course all the many coincidence in the book were contrived and one expected that things would work out so they could stay together.... but it didn't happen... that is life, nothing that easy ever really works out.  It was a cute story.  It is being made into a movie.  It will be interesting to see how they translate the approach taken in the book into a movie script.