M. Suzanne Terry

“…love changes all things all the time. That’s what love is for.”
from The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon, as are all the quotes throughout the post.

Every once in a while, I start to believe that I’m wholly pragmatic and sensible with all my feelings aligned neatly in their nice little boxes. Every once in a while, I start to think I’m not a hopeless romantic.

Then I read a book like The Sun is Also a Star, and I have to come to terms with the fact that oh, yes, I absolutely am a hopeless romantic.

I was not emotionally prepared for how much I love this book. I planned to start a YA novel that I’m sure I’m going to like that is due at the library in five days after I finished this one, but it doesn’t seem fair to subject this new perfectly lovely book to the afterglow I’m feeling right now. I don’t know what to do. Maybe I should read something in another genre altogether.

Maybe I’ll just start it over and read it again immediately.

A big part of this novel’s impact on me is timing. I know exactly what the paralegal Hannah felt like when she imagined she was “living in a fairy tale where she’s not the star.” Until this last year, I hoped that might be enough (as it looked like that was all I was going to get). If I had read it at this time last year, I probably still would have loved it. But it wouldn’t have left me giddy and restless and about fourteen other emotions that make up how your heart pounds when it is so full of yearning it feels like it’s trying to escape your body.

Fortunately, it is our book club selection at a time when I most need to believe that improbable love can swoop in and take over at any moment, with no regard for how much you’re trying to keep it together and mind your business. A love that’s “like knowing all the words to a song but still finding them beautiful and surprising.”

It hits pretty hard on this year I started by throwing down the gauntlet to the universe. A year when I most want to remember that “We have big, beautiful brains. We invent things that fly. Fly. We write poetry.” A year I started by asking “Why settle? Why choose the practical thing, the mundane thing?” A year whose theme I hope to be “We are born to dream and make the things we dream about.”

And to be reminded, as I jump into this lucky year, that it may get messy. “Because everything looks like chaos up close. Daniel thinks it’s a matter of scale. If you pull back far enough and wait for long enough, then order emerges. Maybe their universe is just taking longer to form.”

I’m grateful to Nicola Yoon for rewriting those last few lines “approximately four million times” to get them just right. They were absolutely essential to me, as was this gem of a story.

I can’t recommend this book enough. Do yourself a favor – put aside enough time to read it in one sitting and dive in.