The Sky Is Everywhere

Isabella Danon    
804      

                                                                The Sky is Everywhere
                     
                        The novel "The Sky is Everywhere" by Jandy Nelson, is about a 17-year-old girl named Lennie, who has just lost her sister due to a heart malfunction.  Lennie is now greiving along with her grandmother, uncle, and her sister's boyfriend.  On her first day back at school since her sister's death, Lennie meets a boy named Joe and is immediately drawn to him.  Lennie has different relationships with all of these people.  Each relationship has it's ups and downs, but through time, Lennie learns things about them that she never knew before, and never saw coming.  These realizations help her understand more, and also change her as a person and her views on life.
                          Gram is Lennie's grandmother.  Lennie often gets into arguments with Gram, usually about things related to her sister.  What Lennie doesn't understand is that Gram is in just as much pain as her, but the two of them just have different methods of coping with it.  Lennie blocks out Gram when Gram is only trying to help.   Lennie thinks this will aid her in her time of sadness, but it only makes everything worse.
                             On her first day back at school, Lennie meets a young man named Joe, with a unique charm.  She gets to know him, and the two of them soon fall in love.  Lennie realizes that she has a lot in common with Joe, and he is basically her soulmate.  At one point, Lennie makes a big mistake, and it takes a long time for Joe to forgive her, but she tries endlessly to get him back and prove to him that it will never happen again.
                               Bailey was Lennie's older sister by two years.  She was by far the most important part of Lennie's life, and a role model, since the girls' mother left them when they were very young.  She died suddenly from a heat attack, leaving Lennie overcome with grief.  As time goes by, Lennie learns secrets that Bailey had kept hidden from her for a long time, and it helps her to have sympathy for all of the people that are mourning Bailey.
                               Toby was Bailey's fiancé before she died.  Lennie starts out with a brother-and-sister-like relationship with him, but it soon escalates into something of a secret love affair when Lennie starts to get the illusion that he is the only one who understands what she's going through.  She wants to stop, because she knows that she is betraying two of the most important people in her life (Bailey and Joe), but she is unable to, until one day.
                                Joe, Bailey, Gram, and Toby are the four people that play the biggest parts in Lennie's life.  All of the individual relationships contain good and bad, but in the end, Lennie gets something out of each of them that she wouldn't trade for anything else.