The Sun is Also a Star

This book is soaked through with sentimentality. Anyone with a low threshold for idealistic depictions of fate and soulmates and romance would hate this. However, certain decisions add complexity to make The Sun Is Also a Star more than just intensely lovey-dovey.

First, the style of narration. The chapters center perspectives of different characters. Sometimes we switch off between Natasha and Daniel. Other chapters feature characters Natasha and Daniel know well (e.g., their family members), while still others follow characters who have hardly interacted with Natasha or Daniel, whose actions impact the story in less observable ways.
In addition, chapters are added to provide historical context. These chapters demonstrate an intimate knowledge of the story and those in it, lending a more omniscient voice.

This narration style could have easily failed, but Yoon did it in such a way that it both allowed characters to be distinct while also insisting on the connectedness of everything and everyone. The way the story is told compliments its themes.


I was also impressed with Yoon's depiction of differing experiences with immigration and racism had by people of color in the contemporary United States. Rather than essentializing the experience, Yoon pulls in all of these different factors and has both readers and characters consider generational tensions, familial expectations, cultural mores, socioeconomic conditions, insidious anti-Blackness. She contrasts being a Korean American with being Jamaican with being an African American.

Yoon describes the fear undocumented people shoulder every moment of every day. How precarious everything is for people like Natasha and her family. How she has to work so hard and hope so desperately to keep hold of things everyone around her is guaranteed, has never had to question or earn, has always taken for granted. How everything familiar to her can so abruptly be revoked.

Expressing all of this through an incredibly corny YA romance might seem odd, but I think it shows how dehumanizing immigration policies sever deeply cherished ties established by undocumented persons to the places and people they have grown to know and to love and to call home.