Title: The Sky is Everywhere
Author: Jandy Nelson [Website] [Twitter]  [Facebook]
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary
Publisher: Dial Books for Young Readers
Format: Paperback
Source: Provided by Publisher
Parental Advisory: allusions to sex, alcohol, drugs

“She picks up one of her sticks and dramatically feigns stabbing it into her stomach with both hands.  I know behind the hara-kari is a hurt that’s growing, but I don’t know  what to do about it.  For the first time in our lives, I’m somewhere she can’t find, and I don’t have the map to give her that leads to me.”

Summary (from the publisher):
When her fiery older sister Bailey dies abruptly, seventeen-year-old Lennie, bookworm and band geek, 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.

Opinion:
The Sky is Everywhere is a bittersweet view of how love and loss come together to shape one girl’s life and how profoundly it affects the people around her.

Nelson’s prose is beyond outstanding, I truly struggle how best to describe it’s strength and beauty.  Having rarely read a book so poetically written it was surprising to feel the emotion dripping off the page into my consciousness.  I’m even more rarely moved by a book, I mean genuinely moved but The Sky is Everywhere touched me, it made me cry and gasp and thrum with anticipation.  It was, in no small way a phenomenal read.

I could tell you all about this book — about the beautiful poems and anecdotes Lennie writes and leaves behind everywhere she goes.  About how she wrapped herself up in the memory of her sister through the boy that loved her as much as Lennie did.  About how she came alive again with Joe, her soulmate in the making, through their shared love of music.  About how her family had dysfunction galore even before Bailey left them behind. But really, my explaining it all would not only not do the story justice but would take something away from your experiencing it; and let me tell you this book was an experience, one to be felt and endured.  You feel the highest of highs and the lowest of lows with Lennie as she journeys through one of the most difficult periods of her life.

To say I recommend this book would be an understatement.  It is a book that everyone must read, lover of young adult literature or not.  Everyone.