Review: Every Day by David Levithan

Every Day
By David Levithan
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers

To Sum It Up:

For A, a new day means life in a new body. He never knows who he’ll be next; he could wake up as someone of any ethnicity, male or female. A has always tried to avoid interfering in the lives of his hosts, but that’s before he meets Rhiannon. While in the body of her boyfriend, Justin, A falls for her, and soon he’s risking exposing what he is to be with her. Someone already knows that A isn’t who he appears to be, though, and just might reveal A’s secret first.

Review:

I can’t think of any novel I’ve previously read that even comes close to the premise of Every Day. I love how it’s a fairly straightforward concept, yet there’s a multitude of directions to take it in. And David Levithan most definitely makes the most out of it.

The novel dives straight into the story without any preamble about why A changes bodies every day. It’s just a fact that has to be taken as is. Although I couldn’t help being curious about whether A was an alien or something of that sort, I found that I was okay with not having the details of A’s origins. Credit Levithan with pulling off this idea as though it’s a commonplace thing and could happen to anyone. Normally I would have taken issue with the lack of A’s background history, but my attention was too engaged in the stories of the people whose lives A experiences for a day to really notice.

We get to meet several characters through A’s eyes, characters who are given quite a lot of depth considering how short-lived A’s time is as each person. Never knowing who his next host will be, A is thrown into a variety of scenarios. The most heartbreaking for me was when he found himself in the life of a young woman named Kelsea who was planning to commit suicide. This presents one of the biggest challenges to A’s policy of minimizing his interference in the hosts’ lives. On the whole, I thought A was a principled character (I’ll get to the part where I felt he went astray in a bit.). In Kelsea’s case, A truly wants to help her, and he does what he can for her.

A enters a much grayer ethical zone where Rhiannon is concerned. During the time he spends as her boyfriend, Justin, A falls in love with her. Yup, it’s Insta-Love, but if you’re already rolling with the idea of A’s daily form shift, then you might as well go with this, too. That’s how I viewed the situation, anyway. So not only did Every Day get me to look past the protagonist’s missing backstory, but the book also convinced me to turn a mostly blind eye to Insta-Love. The novel was this good, at least to me.

Once A realizes how much Rhiannon means to him, seeing her again starts taking more and more priority over leaving a host’s life in the same order he first encountered it. I’d stop short of calling A reckless, but this certainly isn’t the same A from the book’s early chapters. I couldn’t really fault him for some of his actions, though, because the nature of his life makes it so hard to form relationships, especially long-term ones. That’s not even counting the gigantic hurdle of having to explain to someone what the dawn of a new day means for A. I did feel that this part of the novel, where A tries to stay connected with Rhiannon as much as possible, put the most strain on my suspension of disbelief. A just so happens to inhabit a succession of hosts who live within a reasonable distance of Rhiannon’s location. A brief mention is made of how A has to go on a long journey if that’s what the host does, but that did nothing to enlighten me about how A manages to remain fairly close to Rhiannon in the geographical sense. Considering everything about the novel that I did accept at face value, I feel like I’m nitpicking here. And I probably am.

Overall, Every Day was a unique, absorbing read with a very unconventional romance. The book sends a strong message about the importance of loving each other based on what’s inside our hearts and regardless of however we appear on the outside, a message that is resonant without sounding preachy or cheesy. I tend to read a lot of series; it was refreshing to read a standalone for a change, and an excellent standalone at that.

All in All:

Every Day could almost pass for a contemporary novel—A’s extra special circumstances aside. I’d wanted to read this for quite some time, and when I finally borrowed it from the library, I was not disappointed with it.