The Sun Is Also a Star
by Nicola Yoon
High School    Delacorte    349 pp.
11/16    978-0-553-49668-0    $18.99
Library ed.  978-0-553-49669-7    $21.99    g
e-book ed.  978-0-553-49670-3    $10.99

New York City high school senior Natasha believes in science and rationality. An undocumented immigrant from Jamaica, she and her family are facing immediate deportation thanks to her father’s DUI arrest. Daniel believes in destiny and poetry. Burdened with his Korean-immigrant parents’ expectations, he is appeasing them by applying to Yale, where he will study to become a doctor. But when Natasha’s and Daniel’s paths cross unexpectedly, and repeatedly, over the course of a day, Daniel is convinced: he is experiencing “love at second sight…the feeling when you meet someone that you’re going to fall in love with them.” Soon, it’s a twelve-hour race against the clock: can Daniel get Natasha to fall in love with him before their time together ends? Can Natasha get the help of an immigration lawyer to stay her deportation? And what will happen if she really does have to leave the country that night? The teens’ alternating first-person narrations are fresh and compelling, and interspersed throughout are relevant third-person omniscient musings on various histories, from the past and future histories of some of the book’s secondary characters to the chemical history of love to a quantum theory of multiverses. Fans of Eleanor & Park (rev. 5/13) and The Fault in Our Stars (rev. 3/12) are destined to fall for Daniel and Natasha as quickly as they fall for each other.

From the November/December 2016 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.