Every Day

Every Day by David Levithan
Published by: Knopf Books for Young Readers
Number of pages: 304
My copy: paperback, from National Bookstore

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.

* * *

I can’t exactly say I’m a huge, huge fan of David Levithan’s books, although I admit that I like reading his stuff. I mean, I enjoyed The Lover’s Dictionary immensely and I am rather charmed by Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares, but it doesn’t make me feel like I would go out and read everything he ever wrote. For Mr. Levithan, I still rely a bit on reviews before I actually get one of his new books again.

And that is why I got myself a copy of Every Day. Truth be told, the summary isn’t enough to get to me — I tend to avoid paranormal things unless I’m watching the series or I strike a particular mood, and Every Day‘s synopsis kind of reminds me of those insta-love things that I don’t really like. Granted, it seems more sci-fi than paranormal, but it wasn’t until I read Wendy’s review of the book that kind of sealed the deal for me.

So A is a…being. Something. He wakes up in a different body everyday, and he has no attachments, no nothing. He cannot afford to have them because nothing is permanent in his world anyway. Until one morning, when he wakes up in the body of Justin and meets his girlfriend, Rhiannon. Suddenly, there’s something that makes him want to stay — and it’s Rhiannon.

We don’t get explanations why A jumps from one body to another, so we pretty much have to accept what he can do at the start. It was a bit hard for me to swallow, especially when my mind gets confused when A is in a female body but in my mind he is still a male. Then I recount his/her interactions with Rhiannon, and it gets even more confusing. There’s a lot to question, and if you’re sci-fi buff, you’d wish for an explanation, and that was never really provided in the book.

However, there is something about the way Levithan writes. Just like Dash in Dash and Lily and that unnamed narrator in The Lover’s Dictionary, Levithan’s words captured me and made me dog-ear so many pages in the book. Case in point:

What is it about the moment you fall in love? How can such a small measure of time contain such enormity?…The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations – all of them rearranging themselves so that this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In your heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just now realizing it, you are just now arriving at the place you were always meant to be. (p. 23)

This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be. (p. 175)

Every Day had the right amount of angst and hope and sentimentality to make me sigh at the early parts of February. Some book club friends and I had a readalong for it, and we had a very interesting discussion about love, about A and if there’s anything selfish about falling in love. I honestly felt sad for A because he cannot afford to have memories, and so he clings so hard to Rhiannon because she seems to be the only good thing that he can hold on to.

It’s sad, and somehow you knew it was a doomed thing from the start. I wondered how Levithan would end it, and I was really pleased with what he did with the ending. It seemed the most right thing to do. It wasn’t the easiest decision, but perhaps it was the best for the both of them. It doesn’t make it less sad, though.

But…that’s love. More than being a decision, love is choosing what’s best for the other person, even if it is at the cost of your own happiness. I read this article sometime last year that hits this right on the head (emphasis mine): How do you truly know whether you are committed to this person and that you truly love him or her? Here’s how you know: Your love is directly proportional to your willingness to act unselfishly, to even let the person think less of you, if in doing so you are serving their spiritual advancement.

Every Day isn’t the kind of book that will give you all the warm fuzzies, but I think it’s a pretty good one even so. And while I still can’t say I’m a huge David Levithan fan after this, I will still be on the look out for his books, if only to read passages such as the ones above and one like this:

When first love ends, most people eventually know there will be more to come. They are not through with love. Love is not through with them. It will never be the same as the first, but it will be better in different ways.

Rating: [rating=4]

Other reviews:
taking a break
The Midnight Garden
The Readventurer