Book Review: Every Day by David Levithan

Oh, David Levithan.  I think your stories are so interesting, but they leave me wanting more substance. Every Day is no different.

Imagine that every day, you wake up in another person's body and live that person's life for 24 hours.  That's what life is like for A, who eventually becomes known as Adam. The only consistency is that each day, he wakes up in the body of someone who is his same chronological age.  Maybe.  Because days and even years lose all meaning when you start life anew every 24 hours.

Imagine how difficult it must be to construct and preserve some kind of self-identity when each day you look in the mirror and see a different person.  Your identity must be separate from everything normal people associate with identity: it's a self-knowledge completely independent from your gender, racial or ethnic background, sexual preference, political leanings, taste in books or movies or music, physical or mental capabilities, socio-economic background, or anything else.  Imagine that.  Really, try to imagine that.  Because I cannot.  I cannot divorce myself from my labels: daughter, friend, wife, cousin, sister. Middle class, Southern, Democrat. Reader, blogger, traveler. Bookseller, religious skeptic, lover of words. Short, white, Irish-Anglo-Germanic background. I could go on, but why?  It would take more introspection than I'm capable of, at least for this blog post, to determine what parts of my identity are unique to me, or my consciousness, and what parts of me are defined in relation to other things.


It's a difficult premise to wrap your head around, no?

Now try to imagine that one day you wake up in the body of some random boy, and you end up falling in love with his girlfriend? That's what happens with A, when he's in the body of a boy named Justin, and he falls in love with Rhiannon. How do you get her to fall in love with you, when she can't bring herself to believe that her boyfriend that day, the nerdy guy she danced with at a party, the new girl she shows around school, the huge football player she meets for coffee, and the suicidal girl she talks to on the phone are all the same person?

How do we fall in love?  Is it with a person, or their essence? Can we ever look past the packaging of the body and truly fall in love with whatever it is that defines a person?

I think conceptually this book is fascinating, but I think to fully flesh out the implications of waking up in a new body each morning, and then trying to have an ongoing relationship with somebody, the book needs to be written for adults. For a book to answer such existential questions puts it beyond the grasp of most YA books.  I would prefer to read the adult version of this book, so Mr. Levithan, if it's not too much trouble, could you please start writing it?

NB: I picked up an advance reading copy of this book at BEA in June, and the book will be published at the end of this month by Knopf.  It also has the dubious honor of putting random lyrics from the Buddy Holly song "Every Day" into my head every time I see the title.

Book Review in Brief: The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

I first heard about The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan a few months ago when our sales rep showed it to us.  Never having read him before, it didn't elicit the kind of excited reaction that I know other readers have had, so when the book arrived in the store, it went mostly under my radar.  Then my friend and former coworker, Rebecca Fabian, posted about it on her great blog called Wildly Read, so I started paying a bit more attention.  I bought this book for myself shortly after I read her blogpost with the intention of giving it as a Valentine's Day present but ended up keeping it when I figured my beloved probably wouldn't like it...That, and we decided not to give each other presents this year as a means of saving our pennies for vacation instead!

Something old is new again with this novel.  It's the story of a love affair, but instead of being told chronologically, it's told alphabetically through dictionary entries where the couple's experience over the course of their relationship defines the words.  Because of its nature, it was a very fast read for me--unlike other readers, I wasn't caught up in the relationship so much as caught up in the narrative structure.  I'm not always a fan of gimicky storytelling in my fiction (George Perec? No, thanks!) because it usually gets in the way of the narrative flow, but this book I enjoyed.  I also liked how the lovers in question go unnamed and genderless throughout the books--which means every reader can read into this novel his or her own romantic inclinations and orientations. I at first identified the primary speaker as male and the "you" as female because of a few details (shoes, a pole dance reference), but I'm convinced in retrospect that it could go either way.

Here are a few excerpts--I chose shorter ones, but some of the definitions cover more than one page:

candid, adj.
"Most times, when I'm having sex, I'd rather be reading."
This was, I admit, a strange thing to say on a second date.  I guess I was just giving you warning.
"Most times when I'm reading," you said, "I'd rather be having sex."

fallible, adj.
I was hurt. Of course I was hurt. But in a perverse way, I was relieved that you were the one who made the mistake. It made me worry less about myself.

sacrosanct, adj.
The nape of your neck.  Even the sound of the word nape sounds holy to me.  That and the hollow of your neck, the peek of your chest that your shirt sometimes reveals.  These are the stations of my quietest, most insistent desire.

One last thing to mention...I love it when publishers are loose and comfortable enough to play with their logos for certain titles.  Knopf did it for the book Geek Love, so on the spine of that book, the traditional Borzoi logo bore five legs instead of the usual four.  I've not seen anybody mention it before now for The Lover's Dictionary, but the three little fish that comprise the logo for FSG (Farrar, Strous, Giroux) have heart-shaped heads instead of the usual triangular ones.  Subtle, but cute!