Every Day, by David Levithan
Every day, A wakes up in the body of a new person. They are always sixteen, and always within a certain geographical range of each other. Everything else varies. It began when A was an infant. Eventually A started counting days, and is now into the 6000s.
A has always lived like this, cultivating philosophical detachment and a non-interference policy. A can access their hosts’ memories, and uses this to go through the paces of their host bodies’ lives, trying to leave everything exactly as they found it. Until A lands in the body of a complete asshole of a teenage boy named Justin, who has a girlfriend named Rhiannon. And A falls in love.
I’ve seen this premise, or something similar to it, a couple times before. The version closest to this one was a short story by Greg Egan called “The Safe-Deposit Box.” But the TV shows Quantum Leap and, to a lesser degree, Touched by an Angel, also played with this concept. It’s a great concept.
Overall, I liked the book. It has fantastic narrative drive and, as I said, a terrific concept. This review will sound more critical than I actually felt reading it; its flaws are interesting and worth discussing, so I’m going to spend more time on them than on what I liked. But seriously, it’s generally very good and if the premise sounds at all interesting, you should read it.
The biggest problem I had with it is that I was interested in the other lives, and in the question of how much a life could change in a single day. I was not very caught up in the love story. And the book is more about the love story. Especially by the halfway mark, A often completely ignores the body they’re inhabiting in favor of obsessing over how they were going to get to see Rhiannon (the logistics of finding transportation to her take up a large percentage of page time), and this was the opposite of what I was interested in.
Rhiannon never came to life as a character, nor did I ever see what she and A saw in each other. She’s a generic quirky girl. I kept thinking there was going to be some reveal about what in her past or current life was keeping her stuck in a borderline emotionally abusive relationship with Justin, when the latter has no apparent redeeming qualities whatsoever. But there isn’t one. She’s the object of desire, and that’s it.
I completely believe that in A’s situation, they would be obsessive and stalkery about a love interest - for one thing, some degree of stalking is required to get to know anyone at all, at least in the beginning. That being said, A was obsessive and stalkery and it didn’t make me root for their relationship.
The non-interference policy was frustrating because A was so inconsistent about it. In one quite vivid scene, A goes through agony in an addict’s body because A refuses to do drugs. (Why won’t A do drugs? I can think of lots of reasons, but A never says why. The conclusion I came to was that Levithan didn’t want to depict drug-taking.) But later, A is extremely reluctant to stop their host from committing suicide. Why is that verboten, but making a host’s body go through painful withdrawal isn’t even considered interference?
What I liked best about the book - the snapshots of all the different lives - also had some holes in it. A only speaks English, and must slowly rifle through a host’s memories to respond even haltingly and in a few words in any other language. If A has been this way since they were a baby, wouldn’t they have absorbed at least a couple other common languages? How could A have possibly cycled into multiple bodies whose language they didn’t know over a period of sixteen years without anyone ever noticing?
Late in the book, A wakes up in an obese body. Alone among all the many incarnations, A is grossed out by the body and gets no sense of the body’s interior life, apparently due to its fatness. Seriously? That’s where A and their infinite experience draws the line? I can see that it was important for A to meet Rhiannon in a body she was turned off by, but there were better ways to do it. (Like a body that bore a very strong resemblance to someone she hated, or to one of her relatives. Squick!)
I also ended up wanting A to experience their lives as more different. Many of them blend together and start seeming very similar. A may have no gender and no race, but people react very differently depending on one’s gender and race, and many other factors besides. I wanted A to notice that more, so they could adjust their behavior accordingly. A poor black boy, a middle-class Asian girl, a white girl in a wheelchair, and a middle-class white boy may have different experiences doing something as everyday as driving a car (a remarkable number of their teenage hosts conveniently had cars) or buying a soda from a convenience store.
And while I’m bitching: there was a subplot that got ought to have been extremely interesting (one of the hosts realized that they were a host and went after A) but was taken over by “evangelicals are idiots.” This was especially frustrating since it led to a fascinating plot revelation that could have taken the book in a whole new direction… about one chapter before the book ended. I wish that had been where that storyline had started.
Oh, and A didn’t sound like a teenager at all. A sounded like Chicken Soup for the Soul. I could buy that due to the circumstances of A’s life, but all the not-terribly-deep life wisdom sometimes got a bit much.
As I said, despite all these qualms, I did enjoy reading the book. It zips along, and I was always excited to get to the next day and the next body. Flawed but definitely worth reading.
Every Day
Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/1141518.html. Comment here or there.
A has always lived like this, cultivating philosophical detachment and a non-interference policy. A can access their hosts’ memories, and uses this to go through the paces of their host bodies’ lives, trying to leave everything exactly as they found it. Until A lands in the body of a complete asshole of a teenage boy named Justin, who has a girlfriend named Rhiannon. And A falls in love.
I’ve seen this premise, or something similar to it, a couple times before. The version closest to this one was a short story by Greg Egan called “The Safe-Deposit Box.” But the TV shows Quantum Leap and, to a lesser degree, Touched by an Angel, also played with this concept. It’s a great concept.
Overall, I liked the book. It has fantastic narrative drive and, as I said, a terrific concept. This review will sound more critical than I actually felt reading it; its flaws are interesting and worth discussing, so I’m going to spend more time on them than on what I liked. But seriously, it’s generally very good and if the premise sounds at all interesting, you should read it.
The biggest problem I had with it is that I was interested in the other lives, and in the question of how much a life could change in a single day. I was not very caught up in the love story. And the book is more about the love story. Especially by the halfway mark, A often completely ignores the body they’re inhabiting in favor of obsessing over how they were going to get to see Rhiannon (the logistics of finding transportation to her take up a large percentage of page time), and this was the opposite of what I was interested in.
Rhiannon never came to life as a character, nor did I ever see what she and A saw in each other. She’s a generic quirky girl. I kept thinking there was going to be some reveal about what in her past or current life was keeping her stuck in a borderline emotionally abusive relationship with Justin, when the latter has no apparent redeeming qualities whatsoever. But there isn’t one. She’s the object of desire, and that’s it.
I completely believe that in A’s situation, they would be obsessive and stalkery about a love interest - for one thing, some degree of stalking is required to get to know anyone at all, at least in the beginning. That being said, A was obsessive and stalkery and it didn’t make me root for their relationship.
The non-interference policy was frustrating because A was so inconsistent about it. In one quite vivid scene, A goes through agony in an addict’s body because A refuses to do drugs. (Why won’t A do drugs? I can think of lots of reasons, but A never says why. The conclusion I came to was that Levithan didn’t want to depict drug-taking.) But later, A is extremely reluctant to stop their host from committing suicide. Why is that verboten, but making a host’s body go through painful withdrawal isn’t even considered interference?
What I liked best about the book - the snapshots of all the different lives - also had some holes in it. A only speaks English, and must slowly rifle through a host’s memories to respond even haltingly and in a few words in any other language. If A has been this way since they were a baby, wouldn’t they have absorbed at least a couple other common languages? How could A have possibly cycled into multiple bodies whose language they didn’t know over a period of sixteen years without anyone ever noticing?
Late in the book, A wakes up in an obese body. Alone among all the many incarnations, A is grossed out by the body and gets no sense of the body’s interior life, apparently due to its fatness. Seriously? That’s where A and their infinite experience draws the line? I can see that it was important for A to meet Rhiannon in a body she was turned off by, but there were better ways to do it. (Like a body that bore a very strong resemblance to someone she hated, or to one of her relatives. Squick!)
I also ended up wanting A to experience their lives as more different. Many of them blend together and start seeming very similar. A may have no gender and no race, but people react very differently depending on one’s gender and race, and many other factors besides. I wanted A to notice that more, so they could adjust their behavior accordingly. A poor black boy, a middle-class Asian girl, a white girl in a wheelchair, and a middle-class white boy may have different experiences doing something as everyday as driving a car (a remarkable number of their teenage hosts conveniently had cars) or buying a soda from a convenience store.
And while I’m bitching: there was a subplot that got ought to have been extremely interesting (one of the hosts realized that they were a host and went after A) but was taken over by “evangelicals are idiots.” This was especially frustrating since it led to a fascinating plot revelation that could have taken the book in a whole new direction… about one chapter before the book ended. I wish that had been where that storyline had started.
Oh, and A didn’t sound like a teenager at all. A sounded like Chicken Soup for the Soul. I could buy that due to the circumstances of A’s life, but all the not-terribly-deep life wisdom sometimes got a bit much.
As I said, despite all these qualms, I did enjoy reading the book. It zips along, and I was always excited to get to the next day and the next body. Flawed but definitely worth reading.
Every Day
Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/1141518.html. Comment here or there.