Knopf Books for Young Readers
August 28, 2012
336 pages
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Tomorrow's body will be the same age as A - sixteen - and in close geographic proximity, but everything else, including the gender, is an unknown. A isn't male or female, A is just A, content to live a different life each day . . . Until A wakes up in the body of Justin and meets Justin's girlfriend Rhiannon.
Rhiannon makes A abandon all the rules that day - and want to abandon them for all the future days - because A has finally found someone they want to be with for more than just a day. But when A will be in the body of an entirely different person tomorrow, is that at all possible?
I was drawn to the Every Day and the idea of a sort of non-corporeal being, moving to a different body every day who finds - and possibly falls in love with a girl - one day while in one of those bodies, only to spend subsequent days trying to find her again. And make a relationship work.
There wasn't as much 'trying to find her' as I had expected, which actually makes sense given all of the technology available today - and, really, points to David Levithan for making use of that.
The setup, the interaction between Rhiannon and A didn't quite click for me. It wasn't that it was weak or missing anything in particular, I just wasn't sold on it being some life changing event for A. As so much of the story was built around that day - and A's feelings, reactions to it - my not loving it could have been a problem, but it actually wasn't. The rest of the story, instead of relying on the early events to sell the relationship between A and Rhiannon uses it as a base and builds on it.
If it does really click for you, you'll likely get even more out of Every Day but as it is used as a starting point, you don't have to get it completely right away.
A doesn't have human relationships and didn't bond with anyone at a young age so I expected him to be a bit more like Jasper in Barry Lyga's I Hunt Killers (my review), with the more detached view of looking at people and observing them almost more as things than beings. Yet, A actually has more understanding and empathy for (almost) all of the people whose bodies he inhabits. More so than, I think, we each seem to have for people we just see on the street - or even friends or family members.
Living all these different lives, each for a day, has really given him a sense of what life is like for a wide variety of individuals. I really appreciated that David Levithan included characters - or at least their bodies and lives - of teens of different socio-economic levels, different genders, different sexual orientations, etc. There were really a wide variety of characters used in Every Day.
The plot, towards the end, took a turn that I wasn't expecting and I really enjoyed the elements that were introduced and where things went.
Rating: 8/10
thank you to Random House and Net Galley for my egalley to read and (honestly) review
gr8 review. looks like a gr8 novel
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