Review: The Sky is Everywhere
RATING: 2/5
I was really expecting more from this book. After reading Jandy Nelson's I'll Give You the Sun and having it be one of my favorite books, I thought this would live up to that bar. But sadly, this book really didn't do anything for me. It was one of those books that I read slowly because I wasn't interested, but I read it just to get through it so I could read something else.
The whole story was very slow for me. There weren't many high or low moments it felt; it all flowed at a constant pace which made it extremely boring. Even the characters were very bland to me. I hate that I didn't like it because I love Jandy Nelson. I probably wouldn't recommend this book.
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SPOILERS
I didn't understand Lennie and Toby's relationship. It made no sense to me why she'd be hooking up with her dead sister's boyfriend. They explained it as them two being the ones who felt the grief the most and they both shared this grief and it's what connected them. But the actually hooking up was like WHY? I didn't understand how their shared grief could equal to attraction to each other. Everytime she was with him I cringed at how wrong it felt.
And because of her and Toby, I felt so bad for Joe when he caught her kissing Toby. Like, damn Lennie, that's low. Especially when she knew that Joe's last girlfriend cheated on him. The whole boy/relationship part of the story was the wrost part, in my opinion.
My favorite part of the book was the poetry illustrations throughout. It was a very creative way to see inside Lennie's mind and learn stuff about her and Bailey and how she felt about her death. I liked that Lennie would leave these poems scattered throughout town and that underneath the illustrations, it would say where the poems were found. I liked everything that dealt with death and grief. Like when Lennie would talk about how it felt now that her sister was gone and the parts where Lennie would have sudden break downs or remember things that her sister would never be able to do again. It captured death and loss in a very real way that I really appreciated. The way Nelson wrote about it really made me understand the feelings Lennie was having.
Another interesting thing was the situation with the absent mother. I liked that the girls would make up these stories about her, and that they believed she was more of an explorer with a wonderous heart than a woman who abandoned her daughters. It helped the girls get through it easier when they were kids and portrayed the mom in a better light so that it didn't make the girls hate her for leaving.
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Overall, very disappointing book that had no impact on me. I'm glad I didn't read this before I'll Give You the Sun, because if I had, I probably wouldv'e never given Nelson another chance.
