A Review of The Sky is Everywhere

The Sky is Everywhere is a book by Jandy Nelson, who also wrote I'll Give You The Sun. Lennie Walker is a seventeen year old clarinettist and classic literature reader who always felt in the shadow of her older sister, Bailey. With her sister's recent sudden death, Lennie is trying to sort her life back together. With the arrival of new kid Joe Fontaine, Lennie starts crushing but feels guilty for enjoying something so soon after her sister's death. But she is also starting to connect to Bailey's boyfriend, Toby Shaw, in a way she didn't expect.

It is rare that I finish a book and I don't know what to think. I felt the same way about I'll Give You The Sun, too. Later, I started to feel like it wasn't that I didn't know what to thing, just a distinct feeling of meh. I know they are well-liked books, but I couldn't get into them.

Lennie is a realistic teenager, perhaps more messed up than most of them with her sister's death, but she's not a pleasant one. I think that when you kiss your dead sister's boyfriend in front of the guy you were sort-of dating, you kind of forfeit your rights to feel jealous that he's with another girl? You aren't entitled to another chance in that case. I also didn't get her obsession with a Wuthering Heights style romance, because I thought the point of that book was that their relationship was unhealthy.

Plus points for her ambitions with clarinet, an unusual instrument to see in YA, and for seeing her develop her goals around it. Plus I did enjoy her poetry, even if the way she distributes it borders on littering and vandalism at times. They're more collections of thoughts and conversations, some one word a line style poems. But that's okay because poetry, like anything else, can adapt and change to the modern world. We don't have to write the same kind of poetry as those who came before, but we still can if we want to.

The grief was nicely done, as well. There's no one way to grieve. There's no set time limit on how soon you can go back to feeling happy, and there's no point where you have to stop feeling sad about it, either. Lennie doesn't quite get this, at her age and going through it once. Grief makes Lennie selfish - when she was going on about how Toby was the only one to understand, I wanted to point out to her that she still had her Gram. Others will react to it differently. Some of the quotes were exact descriptions of how I was feeling back in August/September.

Then there's Sarah, who as far as I can tell, is a feminist to get guys? She wasn't well explained, despite being Lennie's best friend. Lennie shuts her out from grief, and Sarah doesn't try to connect? I understand that sometimes you need to give them time, but most would understand that friendships if they are strong enough can always be picked up where they left off. Sarah didn't reach out to ask Lennie if she was okay, but seemed more interested in getting back a friend on her terms. She's mad at Lennie at one point because Lennie went quiet for a while, this being shortly after Lennie's older sister died. So what I'm saying is that I'm not buying that Sarah was giving Lennie space or trying to help her process things. Lennie's Gram was my favourite character, but I found it odd that everyone else calls her Gram, too. I really wish I could write more about Bailey here, but we only really see her through Lennie's eyes, as the idealised older sister.

The two boys annoyed me. A skater boy and a music genius. If that's not cliche enough, let's have him be from France, too. Toby is literally her dead sister's boyfriend, and Joe was a little lacking in personality. I honestly think the book would have been stronger without the love triangle, allowing more time for Joe to develop. Plus both seem to come round the house at all hours, coincidentally often running into each other.

One other character I'd like to discuss is Rachel. She's given quite a bit of girl-hate from Lennie, because... she got first chair clarinet after Lennie flunked the audition, she's pretty, made a few unkind comments and starts dating Joe after Lennie kissed Toby in front of him. She's not the nicest character, but not quite bad enough to make me empathise with Lennie's internal thoughts about her,

The teenspeak is cringe-worthy, too. Lennie uses the term WTF-asaurus (seriously, WTF?) and I would have stabbed my eyeballs out if I'd read the word Joelirious one more time.

One more minor quibble: only children don't tend to hate being only children. It's just a general fact of their existence. You don't miss what you never had. In the same way as people with siblings can't imagine life without them, it's hard for us to imagine how our life would be different without them. Sure, some of us might have wished for a sibling when we were younger, but I bet most of us grew out of that phase. We're not lesser people, nor do we automatically hate our existence, because we don't have siblings.

I might recommend this book to people who would like to learn more about grief.