Every Day, David Leviathan

I wake up. Immediately I have to figure out who I am. It's not just the body- opening my eyes and discovering whether the skin on my arm is light or dark, whether my hair is long or short, whether I'm fat or thin, boy or girl, scarred or smooth. The body is the easiest thing to adjust to, if you're used to waking up in a new one each morning. It's the life, the context of the body, that can be hard to grasp. Every day I am someone else. I am myself- I know I am myself- but I am also someone else. It has always been like this.

Every Day just blew me away. It's such an amazing novel. The protagonist, "A", has no body. That is, every day, he wakes up in a different person's body, which he inhabits for a day. It has always been this way, and he has always left people behind. But then one day, he wakes up in Justin's body and meets Rhiannon, Justin's girlfriend. He can't forget her. He's fallen in love. But how is such a love possible? I'm calling A "he", but sometimes "he" wakes up in a girl's body, too. But "his" love for Rhiannon is universal, no matter what body he is in.

I don't even know how to write about this book. It was so amazing, so gripping, so compelling. And it's such a novel idea; this idea that you could move from one body to another. A doesn't know whether he has parents; he must, I suppose, but he only stayed with them one day, the day he was born. There are other considerations too. You could commit the perfect crime, and the person's body you were inhabiting would get blamed for it. You could do anything, basically, and you wouldn't be responsible. A terrible thought. Another thought just occurred to me: if A is inhabiting someone, and that person gets killed, will A die too? Or will he just suddenly be in another body?

This book kind of reminded me of The Time Traveler's Wife. It's about an impossible love and whether or not it can succeed over time, in one case, through multiple barriers of appearance in another. I won't give any spoilers.

It seems like every other section introduces some startling new development or realization. Sometimes, that can be too much, but here, it was just perfect. Occurrence after occurrence, event after event. All building up to a shocking end (and there's another development near the end).

There's so many more things to talk about with this novel, but I can't think of them right now. I will just say that now I really want to read Will Grayson, Will Grayson, which he co-authored with John Green.

322 pages.

 

Outstanding Book That Will Stay On My Bookshelf For Rereading (jf I own it)!