Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell featuring Nicola Yoon’s The Sun is Also a Star

Oluwatoyin
Jul 24, 2017 · 6 min read

I read Nicola Yoon’s The Sun is Also a Star earlier this year, a book of the week (botw) by Reading Club(@TRC), a really great book. During that week, some people kept comparing it to Eleanor and Park (another botw they read last year) that the story line was the same, while, the rest said they were disrespecting the book, that Eleanor and Park was way better then The Sun is Also a Star and then, I decided to read the book too.

The Sun is Also a Star *****

Review from : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28763485-the-sun-is-also-a-star

Natasha: I’m a girl who believes in science and facts. Not fate. Not destiny. Or dreams that will never come true. I’m definitely not the kind of girl who meets a cute boy on a crowded New York City street and falls in love with him. Not when my family is twelve hours away from being deported to Jamaica. Falling in love with him won’t be my story.

Daniel: I’ve always been the good son, the good student, living up to my parents’ high expectations. Never the poet. Or the dreamer. But when I see her, I forget about all that. Something about Natasha makes me think that fate has something much more extraordinary in store—for both of us.

The Universe: Every moment in our lives has brought us to this single moment. A million futures lie before us. Which one will come true?

Eleanor and Park ***

Review from : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15745753-eleanor-park

Two misfits.
One extraordinary love.

Eleanor... Red hair, wrong clothes. Standing behind him until he turns his head. Lying beside him until he wakes up. Making everyone else seem drabber and flatter and never good enough...Eleanor.

Park... He knows she’ll love a song before he plays it for her. He laughs at her jokes before she ever gets to the punch line. There’s a place on his chest, just below his throat, that makes her want to keep promises...Park.

Set over the course of one school year, this is the story of two star-crossed sixteen-year-olds—smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.

Similarities

Yoon — Daniel and Natasha
Rowell — Eleanor and Park
Yoon and Rowell — Family, Young love, Separation, Getting back together

Some members on @TRC said Yoon’s book was a copy of Rowell’s book, I’m not really sure why but I think one of the reasons was the “love story.” In Yoon’s book, they found a way to get back together, and I’m sure it would have been the same for Rowell’s book, there was no need for additional grammar.

I really tried to like this book and well, it wasn’t “it” for me, I guess I could say it was because I already really loved Nicola Yoon’s.

I started Eleanor and Park with really high expectations, thinking I was going to enjoy it, but, it was not all that. Rowell tried to talk about a lot of things but she kept on skipping them, like the book was not detailed enough, something was always missing.

She tried to talk about Racism, she missed the point there, and well, it was just the new girl who got bullied.
She started well with Eleanor’s family, but then, she skipped them, how did they turn out? What happened to them? Did they escape her step-father? How did they do that?
The part she explained about her step-father writing the scribbles in her note book did not also hold weight, like, okay, this minute, you’re bullied in school, the next minute, your step-father is probably looking at you in a funny way.
What happened to Park, like why the teenage rebellion to start using make up, like why did he decide that? Did he finally feel comfortable in his own skin??

All I can say is Rowell tried to just jumble the whole story into one book, missing a lot of details and point, this could have been better if she well, explained a lot of things and not just cram the whole story together. At the end, believe me, I thought okay, finally we would know what happened to her mother and siblings, but it was all back to their love story.

I guess this is why I would pick Yoon’s book any day, some people would say they don’t buy the first love bla bla (I don’t either), but Yoon’s plot held weight for me.

In all, they were two great books and would recommend it for teenagers who believe in young romance.

Quotes in Eleanor and Park

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
“Holding Eleanor’s hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete, and completely alive.”
“I don’t trust anybody. Not anybody. And the more that I care about someone, the more sure I am they’re going to get tired of me and take off.”
“I don’t like you, Park,” she said, sounding for a second like she actually meant it. “I…” — her voice nearly disappeared — “think I live for you.”
He closed his eyes and pressed his head back into his pillow.
“I don’t think I even breathe when we’re not together,” she whispered. “Which means, when I see you on Monday morning, it’s been like sixty hours since I’ve taken a breath. That’s probably why I’m so crabby, and why I snap at you. All I do when we’re apart is think about you, and all I do when we’re together is panic. Because every second feels so important. And because I’m so out of control, I can’t help myself. I’m not even mine anymore, I’m yours, and what if you decide that you don’t want me? How could you want me like I want you?”
He was quiet. He wanted everything she’d just said to be the last thing he heard. He wanted to fall asleep with ‘I want you’ in his ears.”

Quotes in The Sun is Also a Star

“There’s a Japanese phrase that I like: koi no yokan. It doesn’t mean love at first sight. It’s closer to love at second sight. It’s the feeling when you meet someone that you’re going to fall in love with them. Maybe you don’t love them right away, but it’s inevitable that you will.”
“Stars are important,” I say, laughing.
“Sure, but why not more poems about the sun? The sun is also a star, and it’s our most important one. That alone should be worth a poem or two.”
“Maybe part of falling in love with someone else is also falling in love with yourself.”
“How can you trust something that can end as suddenly as it begins?”
“We have big, beautiful brains. We invent things that fly. Fly. We write poetry. You probably hate poetry, but it’s hard to argue with ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate’ in terms of sheer beauty. We are capable of big lives. A big history. Why settle? Why choose the practical thing, the mundane thing? We are born to dream and make the things we dream about.”

Okay let me stop here before I quote the whole book.

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