Quick Review: Every Day

Okay, so, I know this is a Cybils SF/F finalist. AND next week's Quick Review, Seraphina, is also a finalist. But, I promise I am not working through the finalists list. Actually, I'm trying to bone up on my SF/F ahead of the January 28 announcement of the Printz Award (after last year, where I'd only even heard of one of the books on the award/honor list).

It's fun to get back into the world of the unreal! And today: body surfing meets romance with David Levithan's Every Day. There are spoilers, as usual!

Summary from Goodreads: 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 idea of someone becoming someone else through extraordinary means isn’t a new one—the TV miniseries The Beauty Inside and the old show Quantum Leap explore similar plots*—and whenever books hinge on gimmicks I’ve seen before, it makes me a little wary. Occasionally a book will jump past or subvert their gimmicks (I’m thinking Code Name Verity, which makes brilliant use of the “novel as confession” trope), but that’s rare, and I’m not entirely sure that that was the case in Every Day.

The unique idea in Every Day is that A, the body-surfing main character, falls in love with a girl, Rhiannon**, and tries to make a relationship work despite extraordinary circumstances. Broadly speaking, it’s a look at how love can exist separate from the body. That’s an interesting idea, and, to be fair, Every Day does spend quite a lot of time speculating on What It All Means, but at the end, I still felt like this was an interesting idea and not much more.

Part of the problem is that A, genderless and non-corporeal, is a hard character to get a sense of. This isn’t terribly surprising, given that he*** has no consistent past or influences, and it takes some logical gymnastics to even conceive of someone with his kind of life. We know that he has a strong moral code (I can’t say I’d be as conscientious if I was given free rein to take over someone’s life), but I couldn’t point to any reason why or how he developed this Do No Harm mantra.

Not helping is that the book starts immediately with him meeting Rhiannon and falling in love with her before we even know who or what he is. I got the sense that his meeting Rhiannon was supposed to be one of those wonderful, perfect days that change lives, but not knowing who he was, I couldn’t figure out what he saw in Rhiannon, whose quiet, submissive demeanor and emotional neediness didn’t exactly strike me as “love at first sight” material.

When A wakes up the next day, he decides to go after Rhiannon, eventually confessing who he really is. Rhiannon often takes a voice of reason approach in their conversations, which I appreciated, telling A that beyond the craziness of his body surfing, it’s crazy to think anyone can fall in love in one day. It’s a nice sort of undercut of YA’s favorite gimmick: instalove, but instead of taking a beat to question his attachment to Rhiannon, A, if anything, comes on stronger. By the end, I felt a little sorry for Rhiannon, who gets pushed into a strange situation that she didn’t ask for, didn’t want, and, especially towards the end, felt very wary about.

A few other things: this might be a style preference, but I wasn’t a fan of the vignette-style of storytelling, where every new body seemed to come with a side story into their life. Although I could see the necessity, it felt like a distraction, especially when the reader was treated to pages-long descriptions of this body’s life, knowing full well that by the end of the chapter, the body would be completely forgotten.

Also: the Nathan/Reverend Poole subplot raised some questions. I couldn’t understand A’s desire to connect with Nathan—it seemed dangerous, stupid, and unnecessary. Similarly, I couldn’t understand his fear of being found out (because he’s impossible to “catch”). That Nathan would disappear for huge swaths of time and reappear saying and adding nothing new also got a little frustrating, and I admit that the end, where Poole turns out to be a(n evil?) body surfer, added a new dimension to the plot that wasn’t entirely welcome. It opened up too much of A’s unique world and seemed to lead directly into a sequel while also making the book more YA sci-fi-adventure than what, I think, it wanted to be: a literary and philosophical exploration of love and personhood.

Every Day rests so hugely on its gimmick that it would have needed an extraordinarily original story to rise above that, and while I found it enjoyable, I’m not totally sure it goes beyond a typical body-surfing story. Levithan, in his acknowledgements, thanks a driver who overheard him talking about the plot for “keeping his promise to not steal the idea and publish it first.” I think that’s telling. Of course, all writers share a (probably irrational) fear that their book will be “scooped” by someone with a nearly-identical story, but in reality, writers should be striving for ideas that are so unique, they’d be impossible to scoop. Every Day’s premise says basically everything you need to know about the plot, and I have to admit, it ended up pretty much how I expected a story about a body-surfer falling in love would (instalove, determination, confusion, resignation). Was it an enjoyable read? Sure. But it still too often felt like the book was a product of its frame, when it should have been the other way around.

*You could argue, too, that this book belongs in the category of “person waking up to realize he is someone or something or somewhere strange,” a category which would include Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Memento, Big…

**Can we all just admit this is a crazy-pants name? Every time I read it, my brain translated it as "Rhino." Or I would get "Umbrella" stuck in my head.

***Taking my cue from the promo material, I’ll refer to A as a him, although I realize that A very clearly has no gender.