I'll Give You the Sun - Couverture rigide

Nelson, Jandy

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0803734964 ISBN 13 : 9780803734968

Editeur : Dial Books, 2014

A propos du livre

Extrait :

This is how it all begins.

With Zephyr and Fry—reigning neighborhood sociopaths—torpedoing after me and the whole forest floor shaking under my feet as I blast through air, trees, this white-hot panic.

“You’re going over, you pussy!” Fry shouts.

Then Zephyr’s on me, has one, both of my arms behind my back, and Fry’s grabbed my sketchpad. I lunge for it but I’m armless, helpless. I try to wriggle out of Zephyr’s grasp. Can’t. Try to blink them into moths. No. They’re still themselves: fifteen-foot-tall, tenth-grade asshats who toss living, breathing thirteen-year-old people like me over cliffs for kicks.

Zephyr’s got me in a headlock from behind and his chest’s heaving into my back, my back into his chest. We’re swimming in sweat. Fry starts leafing through the pad. “Whatcha been drawing, Bubble?” I imagine him getting run over by a truck. He holds up a page of sketches. “Zeph, look at all these naked dudes.”

The blood in my body stops moving.

“They’re not dudes. They’re David,” I get out, praying I won’t sound like a gerbil, praying he won’t turn to later drawings in the pad, drawings done today, when I was spying, drawings of them, rising out of the water, with their surfboards under arm, no wetsuits, no nothing, totally glistening, and, uh: holding hands. I might have taken some artistic license. So they’re going to think . . . They’re going to kill me even before they kill me is what they’re going to do. The world starts somersaulting. I fling words at Fry: “You know? Michelangelo? Ever heard of him?” I’m not going to act like me. Act tough and you are tough, as Dad has said and said and said—like I’m some kind of broken umbrella.

“Yeah, I’ve heard of him,” Fry says out of the big bulgy mouth that clumps with the rest of his big bulgy features under the world’s most massive forehead, making it very easy to mistake him for a hippopotamus. He rips the page out of the sketchpad. “Heard he was gay.”

He was—my mom wrote a whole book about it—not that Fry knows. He calls everyone gay when he’s not calling them homo and pussy. And me: homo and pussy and Bubble.

Zephyr laughs a dark demon laugh. It vibrates through me.

Fry holds up the next sketch. More David. The bottom half of him. A study in detail. I go cold.

They’re both laughing now. It’s echoing through the forest. It’s coming out of birds.

Again, I try to break free of the lock Zephyr has me in so I can snatch the pad out of Fry’s hands, but it only tightens Zephyr’s hold. Zephyr, who’s freaking Thor. One of his arms is choked around my neck, the other braced across my torso like a seat belt. He’s bare-chested, straight off the beach, and the heat of him is seeping through my T-shirt. His coconut suntan lotion’s filling my nose, my whole head—the strong smell of the ocean too, like he’s carrying it on his back . . . Zephyr dragging the tide along like a blanket behind him . . . That would be good, that would be it (PORTRAIT: The Boy Who Walked Off with the Sea)—but not now, Noah, so not the time to mind-paint this cretin. I snap back, taste the salt on my lips, remind myself I’m about to die—

Zephyr’s long seaweedy hair is wet and dripping down my neck and shoulders. I notice we’re breathing in synch, heavy, bulky breaths. I try to unsynch with him. I try to unsynch with the law of gravity and float up. Can’t do either. Can’t do anything. The wind’s whipping pieces of my drawings—mostly family portraits now—out of Fry’s hands as he tears up one, then another. He rips one of Jude and me down the middle, cuts me right out of it.

I watch myself blow away.

I watch him getting closer and closer to the drawings that are going to get me murdered.

My pulse is thundering in my ears.

Then Zephyr says, “Don’t rip ’em up, Fry. His sister says he’s good.” Because he likes Jude? They mostly all do now because she can surf harder than any of them, likes to jump off cliffs, and isn’t afraid of anything, not even great white sharks or Dad. And because of her hair—I use up all my yellows drawing it. It’s hundreds of miles long and everyone in Northern California has to worry about getting tangled up in it, especially little kids and poodles and now asshat surfers.

There’s also the boobs, which arrived overnight delivery, I swear.

Unbelievably, Fry listens to Zephyr and drops the pad.

Jude peers up at me from it, sunny, knowing. Thank you, I tell her in my mind. She’s always rescuing me, which usually is embarrassing, but not now. That was righteous.

(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Twins: Noah Looking in a Mirror, Jude out of It)

“You know what we’re going to do to you, don’t you?” Zephyr rasps in my ear, back to the regularly scheduled homicidal programming. There’s too much of him on his breath. There’s too much of him on me.

“Please, you guys,” I beg.

“Please, you guys,” Fry mimics in a squeaky girly voice.

My stomach rolls. Devil’s Drop, the second-highest jump on the hill, which they aim to throw me over, has the name for a reason. Beneath it is a jagged gang of rocks and a wicked whirlpool that pulls your dead bones down to the underworld.

I try to break Zephyr’s hold again. And again.

“Get his legs, Fry!”

All six-thousand hippopotamus pounds of Fry dive for my ankles. Sorry, this is not happening. It just isn’t. I hate the water, prone as I am to drowning and drifting to Asia. I need my skull in one piece. Crushing it would be like taking a wrecking ball to some secret museum before anyone ever got to see what’s inside it.

So I grow. And grow, and grow, until I head-butt the sky. Then I count to three and go freaking berserk, thanking Dad in my mind for all the wrestling he’s forced me to do on the deck, to-the-death matches where he could only use one arm and I could use everything and he’d still pin me because he’s thirty feet tall and made of truck parts.

But I’m his son, his gargantuan son. I’m a whirling, ass-kicking Goliath, a typhoon wrapped in skin, and then I’m writhing and thrashing and trying to break free and they’re wrestling me back down, laughing and saying things like “what a crazy mother.” And I think I hear respect even in Zephyr’s voice as he says, “I can’t pin him, he’s like a frickin’ eel,” and that makes me fight harder—I love eels, they’re electric—imagining myself a live wire now, fully loaded with my own private voltage, as I whip this way and that, feeling their bodies twisting around mine, warm and slick, both of them pinning me again and again, and me breaking their holds, all our limbs entwined and now Zephyr’s head’s pressed into my chest and Fry’s behind me with a hundred hands it feels like and it’s just motion and confusion and I am lost in it, lost, lost, lost, when I begin to suspect . . . when I realize—I have a hard-on, a supernaturally hard hard-on, and it’s jammed into Zephyr’s stomach. High-octane dread courses through me. I call up the bloodiest most hella gross machete massacre—my most effective boner-buster—but it’s too late. Zephyr goes momentarily still, then jumps off me. “What the—?”

Fry rolls up onto his knees. “What happened?” he wheezes out in Zephyr’s direction.

I’ve reeled away, landed in a sitting position, my knees to my chest. I can’t stand up yet for fear of a tent, so I put all my effort in trying not to cry. A sickly ferret feeling is burrowing itself into every corner of my body as I pant my last breaths. And even if they don’t kill me here and now, by tonight everyone on the hill will know what just happened. I might as well swallow a lit stick of dynamite and hurl my own self off Devil’s Drop. This is worse, so much worse, than them seeing some stupid drawings.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Funeral in the Forest)

But Zephyr’s not saying anything, he’s just standing there, looking like his Viking self, except all weird and mute. Why?

Did I disable him with my mind?

No. He gestures in the direction of the ocean, says to Fry, “Hell with this. Let’s grab the slabs and head out.”

Relief swallows me whole. Is it possible he didn’t feel it? No, it isn’t—it was steel and he jumped away totally freaked out. He’s still freaked out. So why isn’t he pussyhomoBubbling me? Is it because he likes Jude?

Fry twirls a finger by his ear as he says to Zephyr, “Someone’s Frisbee is seriously on the roof, bro.” Then to me: “When you least expect it, Bubble.” He mimes my free-fall off Devil’s Drop with his mitt of a hand.

It’s over. They’re headed back toward the beach.

Before they change their Neanderthal minds, I hustle over to my pad, slip it under my arm, and then, without looking back, I speed-walk into the trees like someone whose heart isn’t shaking, whose eyes aren’t filling up, someone who doesn’t feel so newly minted as a human.

When I’m in the clear, I blast out of my skin like a cheetah—they go from zero to seventy-five mph in three seconds flat and I can too practically. I’m the fourth-fastest in the seventh grade. I can unzip the air and disappear inside it, and that’s what I do until I’m far away from them and what happened. At least I’m not a mayfly. Male mayflies have two dicks to worry about. I already spend half my life in the shower because of my one, thinking about things I can’t stop thinking about no matter how hard I try because I really, really, really like thinking about them. Man, I do.

At the creek, I jump rocks until I find a good cave where I can watch the sun swimming inside the rushing water for the next hundred years. There should be a horn or gong or something to wake God. Because I’d like to have a word with him. Three words actually:

WHAT THE FUCK?!

After a while, having gotten no response as usual, I take out the charcoals from my back pocket. They somehow survived the ordeal intact. I sit down and open my sketchbook. I black out a whole blank page, then another, and another. I press so hard, I break stick after stick, using each one down to the very nub, so it’s like the blackness is coming out of my finger, out of me, and onto the page. I fill up the whole rest of the pad. It takes hours.

(A SERIES: Boy Inside a Box of Darkness)

· · ·

The next night at dinner, Mom announces that Grandma Sweetwine joined her for a ride in the car that afternoon with a message for Jude and me.

Only, Grandma’s dead.

“Finally!” Jude exclaims, falling back in her chair. “She promised me!”

What Grandma promised Jude, right before she died in her sleep three months ago, is that if Jude ever really needed her, she’d be there in a flash. Jude was her favorite.

Mom smiles at Jude and puts her hands on the table. I put mine on the table too, then realize I’m being a Mom-mirror and hide my hands in my lap. Mom’s contagious.

And a blow-in—some people just aren’t from here and she’s one of them. I’ve been accumulating evidence for years. More on this later.

But now: Her face is all lit up and flickery as she sets the stage, telling us how first the car filled with Grandma’s perfume. “You know how the scent used to walk into the room before she did?” Mom breathes in dramatically as if the kitchen’s filling with Grandma’s thick flowery smell. I breathe in dramatically. Jude breathes in dramatically. Everyone in California, the United States, on Earth, breathes in dramatically.

Except Dad. He clears his throat.

He’s not buying it. Because he’s an artichoke. This, according to his own mother, Grandma Sweetwine, who never understood how she birthed and raised such a thistle-head. Me neither.

A thistle-head who studies parasites—no comment.

I glance at him with his lifeguard-like tan and muscles, with his glow-in-the-dark teeth, with all his glow-in-the-dark normal, and feel the curdling—because what would happen if he knew?

So far Zephyr hasn’t blabbed a word. You probably don’t know this, because I’m like the only one in the world who does, but a dork is the official name for a whale dick. And a blue whale’s dork? Eight feet long. I repeat: EIGHT FEET LOOOOOOOONG! This is how I’ve felt since it happened yesterday:

(SELF-PORTRAIT: The Concrete Dork)

Yeah.

But sometimes I think Dad suspects. Sometimes I think the toaster suspects.

Jude jostles my leg under the table with her foot to get my attention back from the salt shaker I realize I’ve been staring down. She nods toward Mom, whose eyes are now closed and whose hands are crossed over her heart. Then toward Dad, who’s looking at Mom like her eyebrows have crawled down to her chin. We bulge our eyes at each other. I bite my cheek not to laugh. Jude does too—she and me, we share a laugh switch. Our feet press together under the table.

(FAMILY PORTRAIT: Mom Communes with the Dead at Dinner)

“Well?” Jude prods. “The message?”

Mom opens her eyes, winks at us, then closes them and continues in a séance-y woo-woo voice. “So, I breathed in the flowery air and there was a kind of shimmering . . .” She swirls her arms like scarves, milking the moment. This is why she gets the professor of the year award so much—everyone always wants to be in her movie with her. We lean in for her next words, for The Message from Upstairs, but then Dad interrupts, throwing a whole load of boring on the moment.

He’s never gotten the professor of the year award. Not once. No comment.

“It’s important to let the kids know you mean all this metaphorically, honey,” he says, sitting straight up so that his head busts through the ceiling. In most of my drawings, he’s so big, I can’t fit all of him on the page, so I leave off the head.

Mom lifts her eyes, the amusement wiped off her face. “Except I don’t mean it metaphorically, Benjamin.” Dad used to make Mom’s eyes shine; now he makes her grind her teeth. I don’t know why. “What I meant quite literally,” she says/grinds, “is that the inimitable Grandma Sweetwine, dead and gone, was in the car, sitting next to me, plain as day.” She smiles at Jude. “In fact, she was all dressed up in one of her Floating Dresses, looking spectacular.” The Floating Dress was Grandma’s dress line.

“Oh! Which one? The blue?” The way Jude asks this makes my chest pang for her.

“No, the one with the little orange flowers.”

“Of course,” Jude replies. “Perfect ghost-wear. We discussed what her afterlife attire would be.” It occurs to me that Mom’s making all this up because Jude can’t stop missing Grandma. She hardly left her bedside at the end. When Mom found them that final morning, one asleep, one dead, they were holding hands. I thought this was supremely creepy but kept it to myself. “So . . .” Jude raises an eyebrow. “The message?”

“You know what I’d love?” Dad says, huffing and puffing himself back into the conversation so that we’re never going to find out what the freaking message is. “What I’d love is if we could finally declare The Reign of Ridiculous over.” This, again. The Reign he’s referring to began when Grandma moved in. Dad, “a man of science,” told us to take every bit ...

Revue de presse :

Praise for I'll Give You the Sun:

Winner of the 2015 Michael L. Printz Award
Winner of a 2015 Stonewall Honor

A New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Book of 2014
A TIME Top Ten Young Adult Book of 2014
A Boston Globe Best Young Adult Novel of 2014
A Huffington Post Top 12 Young Adult Book of 2014
A 2014 Cybil Award Finalist
A 2015 YALSA Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults Book
A 2015 Topo Ten Rainbow List Selection
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2014
A School Library Journal Best Book of 2014
A 2014 Booklist Edtior's Choice Book
A Bustle.com Top 25 Young Adult Novel of 2014

"This is the big one—the blazing story of once inseparable twins whose lives are torn apart by tragedy." —Entertainment Weekly, "5 YA Novels to Watch Out For"

"Dazzling." —The New York Times Book Review

"Have you ever wanted to put a book in all of your friends' hands? This is that kind of book . . . Heartbreakingly honest." —San Francisco Chronicle

"Bold, even breathtaking. You get the sense [the] characters are bursting through the words, breaking free of normal metaphors and constructions, jubilantly trying to rise up from the prison of language . . . The book celebrates art’s capacity to heal, but it also shows us how we excavate meaning from the art we cherish, and how we find reflections of ourselves within it. . . . I’ll Give You the Sun is a dazzling mirror." —Lauren Oliver for the New York Times Book Review

"Both structurally virtuosic . . . and emotionally wrenching. That alone is a rare combination in literature, YA or otherwise. But then add in the characters . . . This book is a rebuttal to anyone suggesting YA, because it tells stories of young people, is somehow of lesser stuff. I’ll Give You The Sun is literature. Full stop. In my opinion, it’s not just the best YA book of the year, but one of the best books of the year." —Gayle Forman for Parade

"This book is many things at once, all of them engrossing. It's a book where teenagers think in almost indulgently poetic language while still sounding genuinely adolescent. It's two separate but equally intoxicating love stories. . . . Most of all, it's the mystery of what happened to tear Noah and Jude apart, and what—if anything—can bring them back together again." —NPR's Guide to 2014's Great Reads

"This book is about many things: grief, sexuality, creativity, bravery, identity, guilt. But mostly it's about love. Be prepared with more tissues than you needed for The Fault in Our Stars, a chunky notebook to scribble down all the quotes and a handful of witty responses when people ask why you're chuckling to yourself in the corner. Because this book will make you realise how beautiful words can be." —The Guardian

"Simply unforgettable. . . . If you’re looking for a book that’s deep and powerful and beautiful, look no further. You must read I’ll Give You the Sun." —Lisa Parkin for the Huffington Post’s “Top 12 Young Adult Books of 2014”

★ “Readers are meant to feel big things, and they will—Nelson’s novel brims with emotion (grief, longing, and love in particular) as Noah, Jude, and the broken individuals in their lives find ways to heal.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

★ "A resplendent novel...Art and wonder fill each page."—School Library Journal, starred review

★ "Nelson’s prose is replete with moments of stunning emotional clarity, and her characters are as irresistible to the reader as they are to each other . . . No matter how they hurt each other, the love among all the characters is huge here—huge enough to destroy, huge enough to forgive, and huge enough to put their broken world back together again." —BCCB, starred review

★ "In an electric style evoking the highly visual imaginations of the young narrators, Nelson captures the fraught, antagonistic, yet deeply loving relationship Jude and Noah share." —Booklist, starred review

★ "An intricate and absorbing work of art emerges from the details of the interlaced sections. Few novels about twins capture so well the rewards and challenges . . . or the way in which people who have loved us remain in our minds after their deaths." —VOYA, perfect score

★ "Readers will be hooked." —Library Media Connection

“The novel is structurally brilliant, moving back and forth across timelines to reveal each teen's respective exhilaration and anguish . . . Nelson's prose scintillates . . . dizzyingly visual . . . Here's a narrative experience readers won't soon forget.”—Kirkus

"Told in poetic prose with the barest hint of magical realism . . . a compelling meditation on love, grief, sexuality, family, and fate." —Horn Book

"I've gotten so involved in a book that I've missed my subway stop because I was reading; Jandy Nelson's I'll Give You the Sun might be the first time where I saw my stop and skipped it anyway." —The Daily Beast

"I'll Give You the Sun is a daydream . . . otherworldly and mesmerizing . . . Nelson's evocative language envelops one's imagination . . . an exquisite surrender to wonder and possibilities." —The Boston Globe

"I'll Give You the Sun gives the word 'intense' new meaning . . . a novel that makes you want to go out and skydive, but if you can read a novel like this now and then, you don't need to." —Newsday

"This one is going to be big . . . It is full of all the good stuff that sticks with you: love, identity struggles, loss, betrayal, and the complications of family, so you'll probably feel all the feels." —Bustle.com

"A blazing prismatic explosion of color . . . I'll Give You the Sun is that rare, immersive teen novel: To read it is a coming-of-age experience in itself." —Entertainment Weekly

"[These] viewpoints—Noah’s at 13 and 14, Jude's at 16—intersect in surprising ways, and eventually come together in a satisfying, if bittersweet, conclusion. . . . Young adults will learn they're not alone in navigating the emotional highs and lows of finding their identity; older readers will have moments of wistful recognition. I, for one, devoured this book.”—Montreal Gazette

"It's a meditation on life, art, family, fate, and how even the most broken people can help fix one another . . . This book will tear through you like a hurricane, leaving you in ruined awe."—Huffington Post

"Ingeniously told from the alternating perspectives of its spunky twin protagonists, this (technically) young adult noel jubilantly holds its own against the fall's grown-up offerings, with dead-on insights about surviving youth—and family." —O, the Oprah Magazine

"You'd think that we were plugging The Fault in Our Stars, but even that comparison might sell short I'll Give You the Sun... [It's] planted firmly in the positive, making for a gravity-defying, life-affirming experience."—San Francisco Magazine

"[Nelson] has an electrifying facility with description, especially how her characters feel at a given moment . . . [Jude], Noah, and the fine cast of subsidiary characters . . . are most memorable for how they poignantly illustrate the most basic of human emotions—love, grief, shame, remorse, joy."—Chicago Tribune

“One of Fall’s most anticipated YA books . . . it’s filled with complex and controversial themes that are relatable to anyone who has struggled with identity, sexuality, family ties and other struggles of growing up.”—Mashable.com

"Will pluck at your heartstrings." —People

"A wild, beautiful, and profoundly moving novel. Jandy Nelson’s writing is so electric, so alive, her pages practically glow in the dark." —Ransom Riggs, New York Times bestselling author of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and Hollow City

"Jandy Nelson is a rare, explosive talent, and one of the best writers working today. Her prose is vivid, breathtaking, and drenched in passion, and her stories remind me why words can change the world." —Tahereh Mafi, New York Times bestselling author of the Shatter Me series 

"I love this book. Jandy Nelson is my new writing hero. Read this book. She'll be your favorite author as well." —Holly Goldberg Sloan, New York Times bestselling author of Counting by 7s

"Jandy Nelson’s writing is poetic and mesmerizing. More importantly, Nelson weaves a novel that seeps into your bones like fire on a cold day . . . I’ll Give You the Sun is a novel that promises a story like nothing else and then delivers it.” —Garret Freymann-Weyr, author of Printz Honor book, My Heartbeat

"This is a stunning, artfully woven story. My heart burst open at the blazing, unforgettable end. Magnificent." —Nova Ren Suma, author of Imaginary Girls and 17 & Gone

"An extraordinary book! I've never read anything like it. Lyrical-unique-passionate-magical-tragic-hopeful—Nelson's characters will fly off the page and into your heart." —Nancy Garden, author of Annie on my Mind

 

Praise for The Sky is Everywhere:

"Nelson's first novel is tender, romantic, and loaded with passion." —The Horn Book

"The author brilliantly navigates Lennie's course between despair and hope, sorrow and humor... a gripping love triangle." —Shelf Awareness

"In this amazing tale of love and loss, Nelson introduces a cast of characters who make the reader laugh and cry." —NPR's The Roundtable

"Nearly everyone who's staggering through life in the wake of a loved one's death will recognize themselves in this brilliant, piercing story." —The Denver Post

★ "This is distinguished by the dreamy California setting and poetic images that will draw readers into Lennie's world..." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A joy to read. You'll remember [it] long after you've turned the last page." —The Romantic Times

★ "It's romantic without being gooey and tear-jerking without being campy—what more could a reader want?" —BCCB, starred review

★ "This is a passionate, vulnerable, wonderfully complete and irresistible book." —VOYA, starred review

"[Nelson] writes with abandon... it's a headlong kind of book, preferably devoured at a single setting." —Los Angeles Times

"Brimming with humor and life, full of music and the poems Lennie drops all over town, The Sky is Everywhere explores betrayal and forgiveness through a vibrant cast of characters." —SLJ

"Those who think young adult books can't be as literary, rich, and mature as their adult counterparts will be disabused of that notion after reading The Sky is Everywhere... A finely-drawn portrait of grief and first love." —The Daily Beast

"A story of love, loss, and healing that will resonate with readers long after they've finished reading." —Booklist

"A story about love and loss... both heartfelt and literary." —Kirkus Reviews

"Sky is both a profound meditation on loss and grieving and an exhilarating and very sexy romance. The book deserves multiple readings simply to savor Nelson's luscious language..."—NPR (chosen by Gayle Forman as one of the top five teen reads of 2010)

"How grief and love run side by side is sensitively and intensely explored in this energetic, poetic, and warm-blooded novel." —The Guardian

"An addictive, romantic, heartbreaking, and wise tale of one girl's epic loss—and equally epic self-discovery. Seriously, stop reading this blurb; start reading this book!" —Gayle Forman, author of the New York Times Bestseller If I Stay

"Wow. I sobbed my eyes out and then laughed through the tears. I have not fallen in love with a story and its characters like this in a long time. Stunning, heartbreaking, hilarious. A story that shakes the earth."—An Na, winner of the Michael L. Printz Award and National Book Award Finalist

"Okay, I admit it. I have a huge crush on this book—it's beautiful, brilliant, passionate, funny, sexy, and deep. Come to think of it, I might even want to marry this book."—Sonya Sones, author of What My Mother Doesn't Know

"Full of heart, quirky charm, and beautiful writing, The Sky Is Everywhere simply shines." —Deb Caletti, National Book Award Finalist and author of The Secret Life of Prince Charming

"Jandy Nelson's story of grief somehow manages to be an enchantment, a celebration, a romance—without forsaking the rock-hard truths of loss." —Sara Zarr, National Book Award Finalist and author of Story of a Girl and Sweethearts

"The Sky Is Everywhere evokes the intensity of desire and agony of heartache with breathtaking clarity. This beautifully written story will leave an indelible impression upon your soul." —Susane Colasanti, author of When It Happens

A Publishers Weekly Flying Start Title

A YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults Nominee

A Junior Library Guild Selection

Translated into seventeen different languages

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Dial Books
• Date d'édition: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0803734964
• ISBN 13: 9780803734968
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 384