I'll Give You the Sun is like a double helix in structure, and the two strands are the narratives of each twin. Their dual perception provides interesting layers to the text. For instance, Noah's journey of coming to peace with his sexual orientation is in parallel to his sister's difficult journey with sexual shame. Also, Jude's tutelage under Guillermo parallel's her mother's fascination with the artist. When Brian and Noah finally reestablish their relationship, Jude also gains herself a boyfriend. It seems the point of this story is not in the twin's differences, as they themselves presume in the opening, but actually, it's about their lives as companions and friends.
The major inciting incident in the narrative is the tragic death of the mother en route to an act of sexual passion and misconduct. In this way, the mother is represented in her son Noah, even though she doesn't approve of his homosexuality, because both Noah and Dianna break social conventions. In this way, the death of the mother echoes the role of the death of a father figure in other stories. It is an absolute call to adult maturity (the death of a parent demands absolute awareness of death). It is also an absolute challenge to either betray social convention in favor of Noah's deepest sense of attraction, or to live a lie.
Jude is not exempt from this. Jude's character arc takes her through the deepest shame, the shame of her loss of virginity coupled with the simultaneous death of her mother. For Jude, the death represents her own adult identity (since she can no longer view herself as a child), and it also represents the shame of human sexuality (in that it invokes a deep awareness of one's own death). In the end though, Jude survives these complicated psychological burdens and finds herself finally ready to become the artist she was born to become, and to be comfortable with herself as a sexual person (with Oscar).
