The sun is also a star by Nicola Yoon - Book Review

Natasha, along with her parents and brother all live together in New York City, illegally. Faced with the possibility of being deported back to Jamaica, Natasha will stop at nothing to plead their case and keep them all in the only home she’s ever known.

On the day before their deportation, Natasha meets Daniel bae, a young man on his way to a Dartmouth interview. As a first-generation American, Daniel is expected to become a doctor and fulfill his Korean family’s hopes and expectations in spite of his own penchant for poetry. 

Natasha doesn’t believe in fate or destiny, she believes in science and numbers, but meeting Daniel has made her question everything, including whether or not they can get a second chance at a different future.

Yoon’s style is poetic, almost surreal in nature. As a Jamaican American author, she writes what from a place she knows, being an immigrant in today’s unsettling reality, and the pressure to conform to familiar expectations.

Natasha is both brilliant and misguided, a little too concerned with facts to enjoy what’s right in front of her, and Daniel is too much of a poet to concern himself with reality. Together, the two of them balance each other out and find that, no matter how hard you try, you cannot control fate.

The fact that it’s made all the more relevant by Natasha’s imminent deportation tinges an otherwise whimsical story with hints of realism, of the bitter truth, as Natasha races against the clock, and Daniel fights to win her over.

While this story isn’t as powerful as her debut novel, a key ingredient is missing in an otherwise solid formula, the choppy and unrealistic ending that, I suspect, was written to appease audiences.