When the World Tips Over

Award winning YA author Jandy Nelson’s debut novel The Sky is Everywhere has been adapted into a film. She is a recipient of both the teen Michael L. Printz Award and a Stonewall Honor prize for her second book, I’ll Give You the Sun, a profoundly passionate book about the agony and ecstasy of love. Her new magnum opus is a kaleidoscopic journey inspired by Steinbeck country, her vivid imagination and her connection to universal emotions. She describes it as, ‘a chorus of voices telling one story that interweaves over time periods and literary styles with characters consumed by private sorrows searching for love, hope, magic, meaning and belonging- a sense of home in a topsy-turvy world.’

When the World Tips Over is split into four parts telling a multi layered tale from diverse perspectives. Like her previous works, it is an exuberant explosion of emotions and ideas. Bold, ambitious, expressive and intense, it transposes the emotional landscape of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden over the fictional Paradise Valley, home to a family curse, shattered dreams, betrayal, duplicity, tragedy, messed up longing and imploded secrets.

Sibling protagonists, 12-year-old Dizzy, 17-year-old Miles and 19-year-old Wynton are at the centre of the plot. Jandy pictured them so vividly, she spied them during a trip through Northern California wine country, ‘inside a white Victorian house built in the 1800s, tucked away in the redwoods by a creek, abandoned, enchanted and perpetually light-struck.’ Their wine-maker father is missing, their mother Bernadette is a talented chef at the local restaurant who keeps a notebook of unsent letters, and their alcoholic uncle mooches around their home. When a mysterious girl with rainbow coloured hair appears one day each of them feel powerfully drawn to her and the Fall family’s lives change forever as a Pandora’s box of intergenerational secrets bursts open.

Where Jandy is particularly adept is describing the hidden inner lives of her characters through the device of unsent letters and emails, bags of words and uncovered histories. Each one buries pain under their outer facades. Dizzy is a hopeless romantic and dessert maker, self-destructive Wynton is a troubled renegade and genius violinist and ‘perfect Miles’ is confused, alienated and tormented by repressed desires. The book is suffused with an adoration of food, the transcendent power of music, the joy of reading and the magical moments that happen when destinies collide.

Amidst the smorgasbord of genres, Jandy addresses important issues like manic depression, the fallout of infidelity, fractured psyches, spiritual connections and the phenomenal beauty of synaesthesia. Her use of meta fiction and intertextuality work well with her story threads intertwined like Scheherazade’s and her characters suffering the same symphony of loneliness experienced by Steinbeck’s. The only quibble is that sometimes the sense of the surreal, like the inclusion of a sentient dog and the magic realism which paints otherworldly pictures, can overshadow the more important messages. It is a marathon read which readers looking for good LGBTQIA+ representation, a fantastical plot, evocative imagery and tempestuous melodrama will enjoy.