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Everyday by David Levithan – Review by Leslie Etzweiler

Posted by on March 13, 2013 in New Book Reviews | 9 Comments


Goodreads Summary:

Every day a different body. Every day a different life. Every day in love with the same girl.

There’s never any warning about where it will be or who it will be. A has made peace with that, even established guidelines by which to live: Never get too attached. Avoid being noticed. Do not interfere.

It’s all fine until the morning that A wakes up in the body of Justin and meets Justin’s girlfriend, Rhiannon. From that moment, the rules by which A has been living no longer apply. Because finally A has found someone he wants to be with—day in, day out, day after day.

The book Everyday by David Levithan was, to say the least, thought-provoking. I had already read The Lover’s Dictionary by Levithan and had already fallen in love with his style. But this novel put a new perspective on life as a teenager. Most teenagers have one group that they have had years to make connections with. He has to change every day. For most people, they would try to stay under the radar, not drawing attention to themselves, just getting by.

The story follows a character, gender and name unknown, as he/she lives his/her life, waking up each day as a new person. The first body he possesses is a guy named Justin. The character, who calls himself A, falls in love with Justin’s girlfriend, Rhiannon. Every morning A got the chance to start fresh. This also meant he couldn’t get attached to anyone. Ordinarily he has no problem doing so until he meets Rhiannon. He makes an attempt to find her when he is in the body of a guy named Adam. He goes to a party but loses track of time and is forced to abandon Adam’s body in a car on the side of the road. Adam wakes up the next morning believing he was possessed and vows to get revenge on the evil that overcame him.

The story is centered around something that many people want – to start every day with a clean slate. But it does more than that; it follows the consequences of stepping into someone’s life by trying to be them. It showed that living a different life is a struggle. He didn’t have a choice in who he would be or what his life would be like.

The book was the most intriguing book I’ve read in a long time. I would sit up for hours reading it just to know whether he would get together with Rhiannon, whether Adam would catch him, or just who he would end up being the next day. Being a teenager myself, I understand wanting to start over and struggling to fit in. But with A, he has to start over every day and he struggles to fit into a new group every day – something I would never want to do.

Leslie Etzweiler is a Nerdy blogger from Elizabethville, Pennsylvania. She dreams of one day writing several books but for now spends her time reading and writing short stories. She has now taken her love of reading and writing to the interwebs. Leslie can also be found making videos, occasionally posting stories to Figment under the name theTBG, and posting randomness on Twitter as @13etzwle.