Nicola Yoon has been an author that I have been hearing a lot of good things about. To be honest, her debut book Everything, Everything did not interest me but when I heard about The Sun Is Also a Star I knew that this was going to be the book that introduced me to Yoon's writing. Boy - am I hooked and need so much more of her writing! 
 The first thing that struck me about this book was the characters. I loved the different voices that Natasha and Daniel represented. They represented two cultures of POC's in American and I couldn't stop reading. Natasha is a Jamaican immigrant who moved to the United States with her family when she was 8. She was old enough to understand and have to assimilate to the United States. But the US became her home and with her idea of her home being taken away Natasha becomes hard. She doesn't believe in fate or dreams. She believes in science and what science tells you is that there is no such thing as fate. Daniel, a Korean American who was born in America to immigrant parents is caught between his own dreams and the dreams his parents have for him. He believes in fate, love, and dreams. When Natasha and Daniel meet they REALLY bring out each other's everything; both their strong traits but also their flaws. 
 The other thing that set this book apart was the way that Yoon did not just include Daniel and Natasha's points of view but also the view of fate in the guise of people around these characters as they are going through their day. Some of them made me cry. Some of them made me VERY VERY angry. But either way they invoked a response out of me that even when the parts of Daniel and Natasha's story got a bit slow kept me wanting to read more! 
 The third thing that was most striking was the explanation that Yoon included in the ARC version of the story of her own brush with fate in meeting her husband, who is Korean. I don't know if this was included in the final copy of the book but it added something 100% authentic to this story that made me love it even more. It made me think of the relationships in my life, both that have ended and some still going on, which if things had gone a bit differently would have been different. 
 I could not recommend this more to anyone, even if you aren't really into contemporaries. From a teacher's perspective I think that this should be taught in highs chool and could lead to some pretty interesting and thoughtful conversations on fate, love, and how we perceive and touch people's lives that we might not know.