The Sky is Everywhere, by Jandy Nelson

From the book jacket: Seventeen-year-old Lennie Walker, bookworm and band geek, plays second clarinet and spends her time tucked safely and happily in the shadow of her fiery older sister Bailey. But when Bailey dies abruptly, Lennie is catapulted to center stage of her own life – and, despite her nonexistent history with boys, suddenly finds herself struggling to balance two. Toby was Bailey’s boyfriend; his grief mirrors Lennie’s own. Joe is the new boy in town, a transplant from Paris whose nearly magical grin is matched only by his musical talent. For Lennie, they’re the sun and the moon; one boy takes her out of her sorrow, the other comforts her in it. But just like their celestial counterparts, they can’t collide without the whole wide world exploding.

Lo sputters: I don’t even really know where to begin. I’ve literally just closed the back cover, heaved out the most satisfied of sighs, and then leaped up, sprinted to the computer, and started furiously typing. This book is, simply put, breathtaking.

I was nervous about reading it, and even though many people whose Book Opinions I put above all others told me I MUST READ IT NOW – still, I hesitated. My brother died in a car accident when I was fifteen, only days before his twenty first birthday.  Now, I have a living sister whose life I treasure with this kind of terrified, adoring cling, and sibling death books haunt me. There are some lines in this book that felt so perfectly crafted that I almost hated them.

-I don’t have a clue what to do with my face or body or smashed up heart.
-My sister dies over and over again, all day long.
-I can’t shove the dark out of my way.
-When I introduced Bailey, I felt like I was presenting the world’s most badass work of art.

It’s hard to be reminded that there is someone who is gone before they made all of the wonderful memories of a lifetime truly lived, or that the memories that were made have been completely erased from the world’s Library of Memories. And this is the opening subject of the book; admittedly, it could hit a reader with a spiked mace of painful WHOMP.

But somehow, like Gayle Foreman with If I Stay and Where She Went, Jandy Nelson manages to convey grief without writing a book that feels repellingly leaden with its sadness.  What’s more, without even one awkward seam, Nelson weaves in all of the other things that are happening at seventeen: fears, sexuality, longing, loneliness, inconsistency, confusion, misunderstanding, discovery, mistakes, lust.

Swoony Boy Alert!

Today is all about our favorite swoony boys in fiction.

Take notes, boys.

We all have a favorite (or two, or three…). You know the one, that boy that makes your heart beat faster, the one you catch yourself thinking about long after the book is closed… um you all do that, too, right?

:::awkward pause:::

He’s the fictional boy who’s stolen your heart, the one you compare ALL other male characters to, and when confronted with a love triangle you find yourself yelling NO NO NO FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT’S HOLY PICK HIM! PICK HIMMM!

Yeah, that one. So we set out to write a single post on our favorite male characters in fiction. And because reading is so much more fun when you can swoon with your friends, we asked a couple of them to give us their thoughts, too. The problem was, nobody could sum it up in a few lines.

So, rather than cut the swoon, we decided to make this a reoccurring post. Each week or so we’ll showcase a new swoony boy – some will be from old favorites (well hello, Colonel Brandon), and some from books we’ve yet to discover. WIN/WIN.

Aaand here we go…