What is The Sun Is Also a Star about?
The Sun Is Also a Star is a young adult novel by Nicola Yoon, published on November 1, 2016. It tells the story of two teenagers who meet and fall in love over the course of a single day in New York City. Natasha Kingsley is a Jamaican-American girl whose family has been living in the United States without documentation — that morning, she received notice that her family will be deported to Jamaica that evening. She is on her way to a last-ditch appointment at the immigration offices, determined and rational, not believing in destiny or magic or love. Daniel Bae is the son of Korean immigrant parents, a romantic poet-in-spirit who is on his way to a college interview his parents have arranged for him at Yale, when he spots Natasha on the street and is immediately, overwhelmingly drawn to her. The two spend the day together in the city. Daniel has a theory: that he can make Natasha fall in love with him in one day, using a protocol developed by a psychologist to create intimacy between strangers. The novel unfolds in alternating perspectives — Natasha, Daniel, and brief interludes from the perspectives of minor characters whose lives intersect with theirs — and asks whether the universe is indifferent or whether connection is real. The book was a National Book Award finalist and debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
What genre is The Sun Is Also a Star?
The Sun Is Also a Star is young adult contemporary romance with elements of magical realism and philosophical fiction. It operates simultaneously as a love story and as a meditation on fate, chance, and whether the universe gives meaning to the things that happen in it. The alternating perspectives and the intercalary chapters from minor characters — a security guard, a record store owner, a stranger on the street — give the novel an unusual structure for YA romance, and Yoon uses them to suggest the density of connections that exist in a city at any given moment. The novel engages seriously with questions about immigration, identity, and the difference between assimilation and belonging, without letting those themes overwhelm the love story at its center.
How many chapters are in The Sun Is Also a Star?
The Sun Is Also a Star summary
Natasha Kingsley wakes up knowing this is probably her last day in America. Her father, a reggae musician who came to the United States on a work visa, let the visa expire and stayed illegally. The family has been living undocumented for years. That morning, a deportation notice arrived. Their flight back to Jamaica is tonight.
Natasha is a scientist in her thinking — she believes in data, facts, probability, and the basic indifference of the universe to human concerns. She does not believe in fate or destiny or love. She has an appointment with an immigration lawyer who might be able to find a last-minute legal avenue to delay or prevent the deportation. She is going to try.
Daniel Bae is on his way to a pre-interview meeting at Yale. His parents are Korean immigrants who run a beauty supply store in Harlem; they have a plan for Daniel that involves Yale, medical school, a stable career, and no poetry. Daniel loves poetry and is not sure he wants any of the things his parents want for him. He is also, in a bone-deep way, a romantic — he believes the universe is telling stories, and he believes in love.
He sees Natasha on the street and nearly gets hit by a car looking at her. She pulls him back to safety. He follows her. He introduces himself. She is not interested. He persists — not aggressively, but with the genuine conviction that something is happening that matters.
They spend the day together. Daniel proposes an experiment: thirty-six questions developed by a psychologist named Arthur Aron that are designed to create intimacy between strangers. Natasha, curious despite herself, agrees to try. They talk. They argue about the universe. They walk through the city. Daniel has his interview — which he effectively derails by writing an unconventional essay about why he wants to be a poet, not a doctor.
Natasha's appointment with the immigration lawyer fails — there is no legal route available in the time remaining. Her family will be deported tonight. She and Daniel continue into the afternoon. They visit a record store owned by someone who once had the choice to stay in Korea or come to America, and whose choice echoes through the novel as one of dozens of contingent decisions that brought everyone to this point.
They kiss. They talk about the universe and whether it cares about them. They talk about what it means to be the child of immigrants — Daniel's parents came from Korea with nothing; Natasha's family came from Jamaica believing in America. They talk about what love is and whether it can happen in a day.
By evening, Natasha has to leave. Daniel asks for her number. The novel forks here: one version of what follows has them staying in touch; another has the connection lost. An epilogue, set years later, shows them meeting again by chance.
How does The Sun Is Also a Star end?
Characters in The Sun Is Also a Star
Natasha Kingsley — A Jamaican-American teenager who does not believe in fate or love and is facing deportation on the day the novel takes place. Her arc is a scientist's reluctant acknowledgment that something is happening to her that data alone cannot explain.
Daniel Bae — The son of Korean immigrants, a poet by nature being pushed toward medicine by expectation. He sees Natasha on the street and believes, with the full conviction of a romantic, that they are supposed to meet.
Samuel Kingsley — Natasha's father, a musician whose decision to stay in the US illegally drove the family into precarious undocumented status. His choices shape his daughter's life in ways she is still sorting out.
Mr. and Mrs. Bae — Daniel's parents, who ran from Korea to build a life and are now pouring all of that effort into Daniel's future, regardless of what Daniel wants from his own.
Irene — The immigration lawyer Natasha visits, who has seen too many cases like this one and cannot produce a miracle.
Quotes from The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon
Nicola Yoon writes about love and the universe with a romantic precision that makes argument feel like falling.
"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."
"Maybe part of falling in love with someone else is also falling in love with yourself."
"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."
Frequently asked questions
Is The Sun Is Also a Star based on a true story?
The Sun Is Also a Star is a work of fiction, but Nicola Yoon has described it as deeply personal. Yoon herself is Jamaican-American, her husband is Korean-American, and the experience of navigating two immigrant cultures — the pressures, the expectations, the complicated relationship to America — is drawn from life. The immigration storyline reflects the real experiences of thousands of undocumented families in the United States, and Yoon has spoken about wanting the novel to humanize a policy situation that is often discussed in the abstract. The thirty-six questions that Daniel uses to try to make Natasha fall in love with him are real — they were developed by the psychologist Arthur Aron and published in a 1997 study that became widely discussed when it was featured in a 2015 New York Times Modern Love column.
Does Natasha get deported in The Sun Is Also a Star?
Yes. The immigration lawyer Natasha visits cannot find a legal avenue to delay or prevent the deportation in the time remaining. Natasha and her family fly back to Jamaica that evening, as ordered. The deportation is not reversed or averted by the novel's end — Yoon does not resolve the plot with a last-minute legal miracle. The epilogue shows Natasha in Jamaica years later, returning to New York on a visit. The novel treats the deportation as a real consequence of real policy, not a crisis to be tidily resolved by the love story.
What is the significance of the title The Sun Is Also a Star?
The title comes from a moment in the novel when Natasha asks why poets write so many poems about stars when the sun — which is itself a star, and our most essential one — receives so little poetic attention. Daniel's reply is that the sun is too close and too obvious; stars work for poetry because we see them from a distance and can project meaning onto them. The title suggests one of the novel's central tensions: the difference between the beautiful and the near, between the romantic distant thing and the plain essential thing in front of you. Natasha, who deals in observable facts, is in some ways the sun — present, real, warming — while Daniel is the one projecting star-meaning onto everything.
Is there a Sun Is Also a Star movie?
Yes. The Sun Is Also a Star was adapted into a film released in May 2019, directed by Ry Russo-Young and starring Yara Shahidi as Natasha and Charles Melton as Daniel. The film covers the novel's single-day structure and was shot on location in New York City. It received mixed reviews — critics generally praised the lead performances and the city's visual energy, but found the film's execution more conventional than the novel's structural ambitions. The film earned approximately $9 million worldwide, a modest performance that limited its impact compared to the novel's continued popularity in YA readers and classrooms.
What themes does The Sun Is Also a Star explore?
The novel's major themes are love and fate (whether the universe is indifferent or whether connection is real), immigration and belonging (what it means to be the child of immigrants, what it costs, what it gives), identity and expectation (Daniel's struggle between his parents' plan and his own desires; Natasha's struggle to admit that her scientific worldview may be missing something), and contingency (the novel's intercalary chapters from minor characters show how many small decisions by strangers shaped the day that Natasha and Daniel meet). Yoon treats all of these as genuinely difficult questions rather than problems the love story resolves.
What other books are similar to The Sun Is Also a Star?
Readers who respond to The Sun Is Also a Star's combination of romance, philosophical reflection, and immigrant experience often also respond to Nicola Yoon's debut novel Everything, Everything, which has a comparable single-relationship-as-the-whole-world structure. Jenny Han's To All the Boys I've Loved Before trilogy offers a sweeter, lighter version of YA romance with Korean-American identity at its center. For the immigration themes specifically, Erika L. Sánchez's I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter deals with similar pressures from a different cultural vantage point. David Levithan's Every Day, which similarly compresses an intense relationship into a very short time frame, has comparable structural ambitions.
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