Yes, I'll Give You the Sun Is Banned!

Jandy Nelson’s Printz Award winner alternates between twin perspectives and timelines. At thirteen, Noah is the artist, sensitive and secretly in love with the boy next door. Jude is the daredevil, their mother’s favorite. At sixteen, their positions have reversed: Noah has retreated into himself, Jude has taken up art, and a family tragedy has driven them apart. Nelson writes with lyrical excess, her prose stuffed with color and metaphor and the kind of emotional intensity that mirrors the adolescent experience of feeling everything at maximum volume. The novel is about art, grief, forgiveness, and the irreducible complexity of loving someone you’re also competing with.

I’ll Give You the Sun was challenged 9 times in the 2024-2025 PEN America data, with bans in Florida and Tennessee school districts. The challenges cite LGBTQ+ content (Noah’s romance with another boy) and sexual themes. The book won the Printz Award, the highest honor in YA literature, and has been praised by educators for its representation of queer teen experience. Nelson has said she wrote Noah’s story because she wanted to give queer teens the kind of expansive, joyful love story that straight teens take for granted. The book’s removal from school libraries takes away precisely that representation.