The Sky Is Everywhere

I picked up The Sky Is Everywhere because I wanted something short and emotional after a run of long fantasies, and Jandy Nelson's 2010 novel kept coming up in lists of books that make people cry on public transport. The Walker edition runs 362 pages, but it reads fast. I finished it in a weekend, mostly on a couch with my phone face down, which felt right for a book about a girl who writes poems on anything she can find and leaves them where strangers will see them.

What surprised me was how funny it is inside the sadness. I expected steady gloom. Instead the first chapters have a grandmother who curses cheerfully, an uncle who cries openly, a best friend who says exactly the wrong thing with love. Grief is everywhere, but so is noise, food, music, teenage hunger for life. That mix is the book's engine.

Bailey and the empty room

Lennie Walker is seventeen and living in Clover, California, in a house full of art and plants and unfinished projects. Her mother is mostly absent, traveling, in love with being elsewhere. Lennie has been raised by her grandmother, Gran, and her uncle, Big. Her older sister Bailey was the bright center of everything. Beautiful, dramatic, certain she would become an actress, engaged to a boy named Toby, always pulling Lennie into her orbit.

Bailey dies suddenly of a heart problem during a school play rehearsal. No long illness. No warning. One day Bailey is arguing about costumes and kissing Toby in the wings, the next day she is gone. Nelson does not linger on medical detail. The point is the shock. Lennie's world splits into before and after, and the after is quiet in a way that feels physically wrong.

Lennie's grief is specific and bodily. She keeps expecting to hear Bailey singing, slamming doors, borrowing clothes without asking. She replays small fights and feels sick about them. As the younger sister, Lennie had built her identity around being Bailey's opposite. Quiet where Bailey was loud. A clarinet player who liked the back row while Bailey took the front. With Bailey gone, Lennie does not know who she is supposed to be.

The house tries to grieve together and fails in ordinary ways. Gran keeps working with her roses and tells Lennie to eat. Big throws himself into painting and repairs. Lennie's mom drifts in and out, saying the wrong things, leaving again. Friends bring casseroles and then stop coming. Teachers look at Lennie with pity. She hates the pity and also needs it.

Toby is the hardest part. He was Bailey's boyfriend, a sweet, grieving boy who loved Bailey completely. After the funeral, he keeps showing up. He sits on the porch. He wants to talk about Bailey with the only other person who misses her the same way. Lennie understands that pull too well. When they are together, Bailey feels closer. They can laugh about her habits, imitate her voice, remember things no one else remembers. It is comforting and it is dangerous, because comfort starts to feel like something else.

Poems all over town

Lennie copes by writing. She has always written poems in secret, but after Bailey dies the poems come faster and wilder. She writes on napkins, on cups, on bark, on homework, on paper bags. She leaves them around Clover. Tucked into library books. Pinned to boards. Dropped on trails. Some are angry. Some are tender. Some are only a few lines about the sky and how strange it is that the world continues.

Nelson prints many of these poems between chapters, and they work as a second diary. They show what Lennie cannot say out loud. To her family she says she is fine. In a poem left on a bus seat, she admits she is furious at Bailey for leaving, and furious at herself for feeling small freedoms. The poems are uneven on purpose. A few are lovely. A few are clumsy. All feel written fast, with a shaking hand.

Music is the other outlet. Lennie plays clarinet in the school band, second chair, reliable but not starry. After Bailey dies, playing feels both impossible and necessary. Breath control is hard when you keep crying. Yet the physical act of making sound helps. Nelson writes rehearsals with care. The squeak of reeds. The conductor tapping. The way a group can sound terrible in warm up and then lock together for eight bars. For Lennie, music is a place where feeling can exit without explanation.

Then Joe Fontaine enters. He is new to Clover, a boy with a trumpet, a big smile, and a habit of looking directly at people. He is musical in the way Bailey was theatrical, full of joy in sound. He notices Lennie, not as Bailey's sister but as a player and a writer. He compliments her tone. He asks what she is writing. He rides his bike around town with his horn case banging his back. He is life arriving again, and Lennie does not know what to do with that.

Joe pursues her with patience. He leaves notes. He waits after rehearsal. He invites her to play duets. He does not push her to talk about Bailey, but he does not avoid the subject either. When Lennie cries in front of him, he stays. After weeks of people tiptoeing around her, someone treating her as interesting rather than broken feels like oxygen.

Lennie's response is confused and very human. She lights up when Joe appears. She practices harder because she wants to sound good for him. She writes poems that are almost happy and then feels guilty. How can she feel a spark while Bailey is in the ground. Nelson captures that guilt without judging it. Lennie wants to live and wants to be punished for wanting to live, both at once.

Toby and Joe

The middle of the book is built around the pull between two boys, and Nelson keeps it from feeling simple by tying each boy to a different kind of mourning.

Toby offers shared memory. With Toby, Lennie does not have to explain who Bailey was. He knows. The way Bailey ate toast. The way she cried after good performances. When they talk late into the night, Bailey feels present. Their kisses start almost by accident. A hand held too long. A hug that shifts. Lennie tells herself it is about Bailey, that they are keeping her alive together. Part of her believes it. Part of her knows it is also about loneliness and about being wanted when she feels invisible.

Nelson does not excuse this. Lennie knows Toby was Bailey's. She knows her family would be hurt. She knows they are using each other to stay near Bailey. That mutual use makes their scenes sad rather than romantic. They meet in woods, in cars, in corners of the house. They promise to stop and then do not. Afterward Lennie feels sick. She avoids mirrors. The secrecy pulls her further from the people trying to help her.

Joe offers a future without Bailey at the center. With Joe, Lennie talks about music, about poems, about what it feels like to play a phrase perfectly. He can be jealous. He gets hurt when Lennie pulls away without explanation. But he keeps showing up with humor. He tells her she is talented. He asks to read her poems and means it. He plays duets with her in empty classrooms that feel more intimate than any kiss with Toby.

The contrast sharpens at school. Toby waits outside, needing Lennie after class. Joe sits beside her inside, nudging her music stand, smiling when she nails a run. Lennie starts to dread the bell, because each ring forces a choice about who to walk with and who to lie to. Her best friend Sarah, who has her own blunt way of loving Lennie, calls her out. You cannot keep this up. Someone will break.

And someone does. Joe learns about Toby in the ordinary painful way of noticed cars and overheard comments. His hurt is plain. He withdraws, which is worse than yelling. Lennie tries to explain that Toby was grief, not love, but the words sound thin even to her. How do you explain that you kissed your dead sister's boyfriend because for a minute it made your sister feel alive. It sounds terrible because it was terrible, even if the need behind it was real.

I appreciated that Nelson does not make either boy a villain. Toby is not a predator. He is wrecked, clinging to the only link he has left. Joe is not a saint. He is a confident boy who wants a girlfriend and does not want to share her attention with a ghost. The book keeps focus where it belongs. On Lennie learning to tell the truth, first to herself.

Letting Bailey go

The last third moves toward repair, slowly and without easy fixes. Lennie hits a low point where lies pile up and she can barely look at herself. Gran, who misses little, confronts her with a directness only a grandmother can manage. Not cruelty. Clarity. Grief is not an excuse to wound living people. Bailey would not want this. Lennie has to choose what kind of person she will be now that no one watches her as Bailey's sister.

That conversation unlocks something. Lennie starts to tell truths in order. She tells Gran and Big about Toby, accepting their shock. She writes Toby a firm goodbye. They cannot keep meeting. They cannot use each other to avoid farewell. Toby begs and accuses her of abandoning Bailey. It is ugly. Then he hears her. They share one last honest talk about what they loved and lost, and let each other go with something like kindness.

She also faces Joe. She does not offer grand excuses. She brings her poems, the real ones, and lets him read them. She tells him what happened with Toby in plain language. She says she is sorry and understands if he cannot trust her. Joe listens. He is hurt and cautious. He does not forgive at once. Nelson resists the rush to reunion. Lennie has to prove change through action, showing up and being steady, not just through a speech.

Music helps bridge the gap. Lennie plays as herself, not as Bailey's sister. She breathes, she listens, she lets sound carry sorrow without turning it into drama. Joe hears it. Their duet playing returns, tentative at first, then warmer. It is not a promise of forever. It is a start, built on honesty rather than rescue.

Lennie also learns more about Bailey's last months, including choices Bailey made that complicate the perfect sister image. Bailey had fears about the future, about leaving Clover, about whether she was as strong as everyone thought. Learning this helps Lennie stop idealizing her. Bailey was a real girl, not a saint. Mourning a real person is harder and healthier than mourning an icon.

The final poems Lennie writes are different. Less frantic. More rooted. She still leaves them around town, but now they read like messages to the living, not only to the dead. The sky, vast and beautiful throughout, becomes something she can look at without feeling abandoned. The title lands. The sky is everywhere. Bailey is gone everywhere. Love remains too, if Lennie allows it.

What sings, what strains

What sings is voice. Nelson writes Lennie in first person with a poet's ear but a teenager's bluntness. Sentences swing from lyrical to funny in a paragraph. A description of light through trees sits next to a joke about Gran's language. The poems scattered through the book could have felt like decoration. Instead they feel like breathing holes. When prose cannot hold feeling, a poem tries.

The Clover setting also sings. Small town California with forests, rivers, school hallways smelling of disinfectant. Bike rides, swimming holes, band rooms, kitchens with chipped mugs. The physical world keeps pulling Lennie back when she wants to float away. These details keep a sad story from feeling airless.

What strains, fairly, is the central triangle. Even with Nelson's care, some readers will struggle to sympathize with Lennie while she lies to Joe and sneaks with Toby. The book asks you to hold two ideas. What she does is wrong, and why she does it makes sense. If you need a heroine who always acts well, Lennie will frustrate you for a hundred pages. I stayed with her because Nelson shows shame in real time. That cycle felt true to grief, even when I wanted to shake her.

Pacing in the middle wobbles a little. There are many scenes of hiding, texting, rehearsing, crying, repeating. That repetition shows a pattern Lennie cannot break, but it can feel slow near the middle. Readers who want plot will find the book thin. This is a novel of feeling, not events. One death at the start, then months of aftershocks.

Should you read it. If you like young adult romance that takes grief seriously, yes. If you want contemporary romance with music, poems, California light, and a heroine who makes mistakes and owns them, this fits. Bring tissues, but expect to laugh too. Lennie's voice, Gran's swearing, Joe's trumpet jokes, they keep the sky bright even when clouds gather. I closed the 362 page Walker edition feeling wrung out and oddly hopeful, which seems exactly the point.