If you’re getting married you want to believe it’s going to work out. And when I say believe I mean know. You don’t want to be reading books in which the bride-to-be finds out that her fiancé already has a wife locked up in an attic, or about an adulterous woman throwing herself under a train. And under no circumstances, none whatsoever, do you want to read Winnie The Pooh and hear about Christopher Robin growing up and leaving Pooh in the woods.
No, for your pre-wedding reading you want something that is going to affirm that this knock-out party you are about to have, this bank-balance-draining dress that you are about to buy, this person that you are about to sign up to with no chance of ‘cancel your contract at any time’, that this is a brilliant idea that is going to bring your life meaning, direction and joy.
And for that you might want to take a look at an author who says on her bio:
‘I believe in love. Really, truly.’
She does. I can attest to that. I just read three hundred and forty eight pages that came from her brain, and then I online stalked her. She is married to the love of her life and they write books together and have the cutest kid. She has blue-dyed, tightly curled, Afro-American hair and has launched, with her Korean-American husband, a publishing label dedicated to Young Adult novels starring people of colour. Spending time in the presence of Nicola - which is what reading a book ultimately is, it’s going for a little road trip in someone else’s mind - doesn’t just help you believe in love, it helps you know that love can be fun.
I needed this. I’d just parted from my partner on a railway station platform. We’d been parting like this all summer long but this time was different. We wouldn’t write each other cute little messages when we got back to our respective messages. I would take the dogs to bed with me. They would wake me up in the middle of the night and I would read.
‘I don’t believe in love,’ says the girl, Natasha, in ‘The Sun Is Also A Star.’
‘It’s not a religion,’ counters Daniel, the boy, ‘it exists whether you believe in it or not.’
Natasha is a seventeen year old with a passion for science, but she and her family are undocumented Jamaican immigrants living in New York and her dad’s just got done for driving into a police car after a few too many beers, and now they are about to be deported and science can’t save her. And that’s when she meets Daniel, a hopeless romantic born to Korean parents who slave away selling black hair care products (Korean hair was used after World War Two to make black wigs, we learn, and Koreans in the USA have the handle on the African-American hair industry) and want nothing more than for Daniel to become a doctor, have a comfortable life and in so doing have won their hard-earned American dream. Daniel just wants to write poems, because when he writes he feels good, and then one day he meets Natasha.
The Sun Is Also A Star takes place over the course of Natasha and Daniel’s one-day meeting, but addresses the coincidences that have led to their meeting in a series of asides that work as two or three page short stories. We hear about the back story of the security guard who makes Natasha late for a meeting, which means that she will later meet Daniel, or the driver of a white BMW who almost runs Natasha over, thus allowing Daniel to save her life. As Natasha and Daniel walk beneath the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan, it’s as though the author pauses them and presses play on some of the other people in the picture, so we can catch a glimpses of the series of coincidences and choices in other people’s lives, and hear time and again how things don’t always go as planned.
Science versus fate is a hot theme in this book, and there are also asides as well as explanations from Natasha herself about anything from the black hair market in North America (see above) to why the universe is made up of 27% dark matter, an unaccounted for substance of considerable mass that Daniel decides must be love. Natasha doesn’t believe in love, but finds out that she wants to.
I want to write that to read ‘The Sun Is Also A Star’ is like being a teenager again, but I never had a big teen love like Natasha and Daniel, I had a few soggy kisses with boys that looked like uncool, spottier versions of a young Justin Timberlake, and I wondered ever so vaguely if my lack of interest in this meant I might be gay. I wasn’t though, and years later I did have a chance encounter with someone, much like Natasha and Daniel, who I fell for over the course of one day but who was very soon going to be leaving the country. He’s been married for some years now and lives on the other side of the world with his beautiful wife and twins. He and his wife backpacked for years before settling down and in all the photos of them that I’ve seen, they are glowing. They look like Nicola, like people who really, truly believe in love.
Not everybody does get a happy ending, we know that. The Sun Is Also A Star knows that too, but it says that all the unhappy stories and unplanned events that may or may not happen to a person over the course of a life do not deny the existence of and indeed the joy of love.
Before you get married, you want to read a book that celebrates love and that reminds you how very lucky you are to be choosing love, and to have been chosen.
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