A complex book about a girl only sort of dealing with the death of her mother. Finding out she has an aunt, and her mother's past, serves to complicate her feelings on the issue.

I thought that I would get into this book but sadly I was unable to get into this book. I didn't finish it at all. This book is DNF

I really enjoyed this book! It was a quick read and had nice writing. I liked the characters and message too!

It's a normal Florida summer when all of sudden, the mother of Dani Falls is attacked and killed by a bear while she was sunbathing in the backyard. Dani has to leave their rental house and is sent out to live with her aunt, who she doesn't know very well, in New Mexico
After all that happened, Dani feels numb, and living with her aunt only makes her feel awkward
To escape, and altough its quite hot weather in New Mexico, she goes out for long walks. On one of her walks she meets Paulo, who is very friendly and unterstanding to her. Although she is hesitant at first, a mutual trust and affection develop between Dani and Paulo, and Dani begins to heal. And as she and her aunt begin to connect, Dani learns about her mother’s past. Forgiving isn’t easy, but maybe it’s the only way to move forward.
In the second part of the book, the story is told by Dani's aunt, during the time she was younger and lived with Dani's mom and their parents. The family was quite abusive and dysfunctional, and during this part of the book the reader gets to know why Dani's mom was so distant and unloving to her..

Because of the Sun is a nice novel. Altough some of the parts where a little odd, it was interesting and entertaining. I really liked that the author divided it into two parts so the reader gets to know why Dani's mom and aunt Shelly acted the way they did, because of that the first part made much more sense in retrospect.Because of the Sun is a complex novel about family, dissociation, and toxic relationships. But also about healing, and I liked how Dani, altough all she had to endure, started to heal because of her meetups with Paolo.

Overall a very nice and more serious YA novel dealing with a lot of family problems and healing.

Because of the Sun is a unique book told in three parts. The first part is before the accident. The second part is after the accident. And the third part is a whirlwind of a lot of things. Past, present, pain, sorrow, happiness, agony, insanity and, most important of all, healing.

Dani is the opposite of her mother. She works her ass off to be that way. I found myself really connecting with Dani and her pain. She really wanted to hate her mother for all the horrible things she had done. But, in the end, she couldn't hate her mother and I am so glad she couldn't because it made her a stronger person.

While I'm sitting here, trying to figure out what points in the book to remark on, I realized that the book is fragmented in my head. There are many events(Paulo, his abuela, Shelly, abuse, school, movies, etc) that feel far away and pointless while others seem to drive the story and get in your face. But I can't piece out the book like that because ALL of these things, no matter how trivial they might seem, made the book what it was. They made Dani who she was and who she was becoming. Sometimes even the tiniest things have a big impact.

I went into this book thinking it was going to be a diverse read. For some reason my brain just thought the main character wasn't a white female. And while the protagonist isn't diverse in race, the book more than makes up for that with the plot and side characters.

When you read the synopsis for this book it makes it seem like The Stranger plays a HUGE roll. Dani fought to get the book. Yes, she did read it throughout the story but it was always something in the background. It's not exactly a bad thing I just thought it would be more prevalent because of the way it was mentioned in the synopsis.

Abuse.... Let's discuss this. Abuse is horrible no matter what form it comes in. Sometimes, I feel like it's genetic with how many people because abusers after being predisposed to it. I mean, it really could be genetic if you look at it as a mental illness. Regardless of whether it is genetic or not, it is still something that is swept under the rug, hidden behind bedroom doors and whispered about between housewives that know it is happening to someone they know. Most abusers have a trigger and the most common trigger is alcohol. But there are people who are just so wicked that they don't need an external source to elicit the screwed up side of them.

The past seems to always come back to haunt you. Sometimes, it's not even your own past. It's the past of someone you love. Someone you are close to. And it's not fair that you have to face another person's past. Something you had nothing to do with. But you do it because there is no way around it. Dani had to face her mother's past but her mother wasn't even brave enough to face it herself. Shelly had to face her demons. Demons that her own mother stood up to. So Ruby, Dani's mother, seemed to be the odd one out.

The ending of this book was beautiful and so sad but I believe Dani and Shelly will finally be okay. They have a long road of healing ahead of them but they are strong and have each other to lean on.

Overall, I gave the book 4.5/5 stars.

Dani’s mom is killed by a bear and Dani is sent to a desert town to live with an aunt she has never known. As Dani chooses to read The Stranger by Albert Camus, she finds something in the work that resonates with her. Her mother was not good or kind, and their relationship was strained. What Dani will learn out in the desert, with the help of her aunt and a boy named Paolo, will help her understand her mother and deal with her death.

Really harrowing read, very interesting.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book but it was very powerful and raw. I requested it because of the author since I knew she was Latinx and I’m very impressed with her writing style.

The plot is full of emotion. We follow Dani, who has a tough relationship with her mom who then dies after being mauled by a bear in their backyard. Dani is then sent to live with her aunt that she didn’t even know existed and the grief and anger come with her and haunt her. The plot isn’t linear so I find it really hard to articulate how I feel about this book. Dani’s story is really heartbreaking and intense. This is accentuated by the way the story is formatted. This book is divided into three different parts. All of them cover different parts of Dani’s journey and have different lengths to each of them. This really threw me off in the beginning because I’m so used to reading chapter by chapter, that it took me awhile to grasp why and how these parts told the story. Right off the bat, the story starts with showing us Dani’s relationship with her mom which is not the best and her subsequent death which sends Dani into a tailspin of emotions that she can’t really identify. It was so powerful and written in such a way that it hit me and I felt so much for Dani and what she was going through. The indecision and all the different emotions she goes through are so intense that she just shuts down and becomes numb to everything around her. This was her attitude for the majority of the book which didn’t really help me connect with her but made so much sense to her life and her journey and what she was going through. Some of the scenes in this book were really confusing and some even dangerous and life threatening. I became really worried about Dani’s health and her well being and she didn’t really receive enough attention on her behavior for the majority of the book in my opinion. There’s a very unique and specific way that the author uses to express and explain Dani’s grief and emotional turmoil that took me a while to get used to and to realize that it was that, a depiction of how she was feeling. It felt kind of weird and strange at first because it’s not something that I’ve ever read before but I think it was an amazing way to help me understand Dani and how she felt specially since I didn’t connect with her that way. She also does things that can really hurt her but not consciously which is where the dangerous part comes in. I’m glad she did not die because of them but I think there should’ve been a lot more focus on that and making sure she was being healthy much earlier than it actually happened. There’s a section in this book where we get a different POV that explains a lot of why Dani’s mom was the way she was and that was freaking heartbreaking and sad and totally necessary for the reader and for Dani to know. It’s so crazy how things happen in life and if you don’t process them or deal with them, they’ll snowball and affect so many other people along the way. I really loved how the author explored that in this book. But yeah, this book was really easy to read and the ending was quite sweet and very hopeful which made me happy. I also have to say that there’s a slight romance here though it doesn’t take a bigger spotlight than it should which I appreciate.

I’ve talked about Dani a lot above so I’ll try to keep this part brief. I found it really hard to connect to her because she’s so disconnected from life around her and from her emotions. It’s something that was really hard to read because as the reader, it’s so easy to see how much that’s hurting her whether or not she thinks so. She gets herself into dangerous situations but also manages to meet a lot of great people who help her and keep an eye out for her. She learned a lot of things about her family and where she comes from and made sense of her relationship with her mom. I loved her journey and her growth as a character. She focuses a lot of on a book called The Stranger which I’ve never read which was a bit frustrating while reading this book, but the main character of that book goes through life emotionless after the death of his mother and Dani understands him a whole lot. I liked seeing how a book helped her come to terms with how she was feeling and how she wanted her life to be because I feel like that’s true for all of us.

Now I’ll talk a little about the side characters. I really liked Paulo. I loved how he made sure to interact with Dani. He understood her grief and sadness and managed to make her feel safe in his presence most of the time while still sort of pushing her to feel and to grief and to go through her emotions. He’s so sweet and kind and I loved how he spoke about movies. Their relationship was really genuine. Doña Marcela says very little and yet I felt her presence immensely throughout the novel. A strong and supportive figure always there to lend a helping hand with such clear morals and values. She reminded me a lot of my own grandma with her no nonsense attitude and her natural remedies to sadness like tea haha. I loved how their showed their Latinx culture and how that kind of helped Dani as well in a very particular way. Dani meets a few friends in school that aren’t really a central part of the story, but I loved how pretty much all of them were Latinx and how frankly they spoke of their lives and their futures. They definitely brought some comic relief to an otherwise intense story and I appreciated that. Last but not least, I liked Shelley. I felt for her and her life and how things got so far away from her control which caused her to have a kind of empty life. I’m so happy with how her relationship with Dani developed and how they began to lean on each other. It was such a great arc and it was my favorite part of the story.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. I definitely did not know how it was gonna be when I started but I’m really glad that I read it. I didn’t connect with the main character as much as I wanted but I loved reading about her journey. The writing was really unique and the author managed to explain a lot of things in very special ways. I’m interested to read more of her books now.

This book is. . . odd?
First off, I wasn't entirely sold on the beginning of the story. It begins with Dani's mother getting killed by a bear. In their backyard. In suburban Florida. I've never been to Florida and maybe there are tons of bears just walking around.. But I would've been able to find it more realistic if maybe it was an alligator? Anyways, I decided to look past this.
Dani is a hard character to enjoy.
I think Jenny Torres Sanchez had a brilliant reason for creating Dani and a beautiful outcome for her story.. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything to connect with her in order to finish the book. I got about 25% into the story before calling it quits.
I'm a little disappointed, but this book is certainly not for me.
Dani's disconnection is hard to get through because it's so depressing. It's hard for me to read this story when I've been dealing with my own father's passing, and maybe if it was another me reading this then I'd enjoy it.. But sadly, I just couldn't finish it.

Because of the Sun is a complex novel about family, dissociation, and toxic relationships. Told primarily from the POV of Dani, a girl who has had an abusive upbringing thanks to a mother who seemed to hate her, it tells the story of a girl who doesn't feel like she has a place in the world. Before you jump to "ah, another angst novel", it is to be noted that this is a character who has dissociated from the world and whose favorite way of getting numb is getting a sunstroke on a semi-regular basis. The book doesn't shy from displaying toxic parenting, whether it is the one from Dani's mother, or from Dani's grandfather to his two daughters: the theme is to connect two people who were hurting the same, in this case, Dani and her aunt Shelley. There is also a lot of symbolism going on, with the bear and the constant hallucinations and dreams - it was past my bedtime when I was reading it, so forgive me for not going deep into it. But the fact is that it detracts from the main storyline a lot - it is written well when it comes to being in the mind of the character, but it suffers from an imbalance when it comes to progressing the story. The romance, too, seemed superfluous, and I felt it was there for the sake of it. Overall, I would recommend this book if you love emotional stories about family and healing.

Because of the Sun is a gem of a little book. It’s so unique with several layers to the story. The writing is very lyrical and dreamlike. It has a diversity, grief, and beautiful relationships at the heart of everything.

Dani Falls and her mother don’t exactly have the best relationship. In fact, she is just tolerating life in Florida when her mother dies in a brutal way. This only sinks Dani further into a dark place where she alienates herself. A social worker takes her to live with an Aunt she didn’t know existed in New Mexico. The aunt doesn’t want anything to do with her, so she walks for insane amounts of time just to get out. In the heat, mind you. Dani has to learn to handle loss and grief and find a way to move on.

The story has strong parallels to The Stranger by Albert Camus. When Dani chooses to read the novel for her summer reading, she relates to the main character Meursault in a way she never expected. Dani connects to his detachment from the world after his mother’s death. It’s a beautiful connection. For those of us that enjoy literary references throughout, this is perfect for The Stranger is interwoven into the plot.

The friendship Dani forms with Paulo is so beautiful and sweet. I loved the connection they formed and how they strengthened each other. I also loved the family relationship explored in the story. I won’t say more about that for fear of spoilers, but it’s so wonderful to explore how our relationships with family can change.

There is strong crossover appeal. I think readers of all ages could find solace in this fantastic story. If you enjoyed We Were Liars, this is a great one to check out. I highly recommend!