A review by thedubstepdoge
Every Day by David Levithan

adventurous emotional funny hopeful inspiring mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Wow…….. this book is just….. phenomenal. I’ve never read anything like this before. This is just so unique and such an interesting premise and it’s so well written. I had had this on my to-read list for a bit because it seemed interesting and i happened to find it at a thrift store yesterday and got instantly hooked, i swear i could not put it down. A is such an interesting and cool character, it’s really interesting seeing the perspective of a different person each day and how people are alike in so many different ways but also different in ways we never really think of. 

As i said before, the writing is excellent and A has such a unique and interesting view of the world since they view it through a different lenses every single day. Here’s some quotes I liked a lot from the book:
  • “School is school—she wants it to be over, but she’s afraid of it being over, because then she’ll have to figure out what comes next.” (12)
  • “Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen.” (56)
  • “There are many things that can keep you in a relationship, Fear of being alone. Fear of disrupting the arrangement of your life. A decision to settle for something that’s okay, because you don’t know if you can get any better. Or maybe there’s the irrational belief that it will get better, even if you know he won’t change.” (71)
  • “I have been to many religious services over the years. Each one I go to only reinforces my general impression that religions have much, much more in common than they like to admit. The beliefs are almost always the same; it's just that the histories are different. Everybody wants to believe in a higher power. Everybody wants to belong to something bigger than themselves, and everybody wants company in doing that. They want there to be a force of good on earth, and they want an incentive to be a part of that force. They want to be able to prove their belief and their belonging, through rituals and devotion. They want to touch the enormity. / It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. Yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren't a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion—whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.” (77)
  • “This is the trap of having something to live for: Everything else seems lifeless” (116)
  • “Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over. / I know how wrong this is. / When I was a child, I didn't understand. I would wake up in a new body and wouldn't comprehend why things felt muted, dimmer. Or the opposite—I'd be supercharged, unfocused, like a radio at top volume flipping quickly from station to station. Since I didn't have access to the body's emotions, I assumed the ones I was feeling were my own. Eventually, though, I realized these inclinations, these compulsions, were as much a part of the body as its eye color or its voice. Yes, the feelings themselves were intangible, amorphous, but the cause of the feelings was a matter of chemistry, biology. / It is a hard cycle to conquer. The body is working against you. And because of this, you feel even more despair. Which only amplifies the imbalance. It takes uncommon strength to live with these things. But I have seen that strength over and over again. When I fall into the life of someone grappling, I have to mirror their strength, and sometimes surpass it, because I am less prepared.” (119-120)
  • “We come to a corner where there are a few people protesting the [pride parade] festivities. I don't understand this at all. It's like protesting the fact that some people are red-haired. / In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love with a gender. I have fallen for individuals. I know this is hard for people to do, but I don't understand wh it's so hard, when it's so obvious.” (142)
  • “It's like Cinderella in reverse. I've danced with the prince, and now I'm back home, cleaning the toilets. That is my punishment—every toilet, every tub, every garbage pail. This would be bad enough, but every few minutes, George's mother stops in to give me a lecture about "the sins of the flesh." I hope that George doesn't internalize her scare tactics. I want to argue with her, tell her that "sins of the flesh" is just a control mechanism—if you demonize a person's pleasure, then you can control his or her life. I can't say how many times this tool has been wielded against me, in a variety of forms. But I see no sin in a kiss. I only see sin in the condemnation.” (223)
  • “On the drive, I access pieces of Vic's history. There are few things harder than being born into the wrong body. I had to deal with it a lot when I was growing up, but only for a day. Before i became so adaptable—so acquiescent to the way my life worked—I would resist some of the transitions. I loved having long hair, and would resent it when I woke up to find my long hair was gone. There were days I felt like a girl and days I felt like a boy, and those days wouldn't always correspond with the body I was in. I still believed everyone when they said I had to be one or the other. Nobody was telling me a different story, and I was too young to think for myself. I had yet to learn that when it came to gender, I was both and neither. / It is an awful thing to be betrayed by your body. And it's lonely, because you feel you can't talk about it. You feel it's something between you and the body. You feel it's a battle you will never win… and yet you fight it day after day, and it wears you down. Even if you try to ignore it, the energy it takes to ignore it will exhaust you.” (254)

Anyways yeah this was an excellent book and I enjoyed reading it very much. I just ordered the second and third books and am really curious to where the story will go from here, no spoilers but the ending was pretty crazy and surprising and this book overall is super good.
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