Every Day

"A" wakes up in a different sixteen-year-old's body every morning; bodies match his/her (the protagonist is, in essence, gender neutral) age and A never travels far geographically unless the host body does. But what happens when A falls in love? Levithan poses this question early on and then shapes the narrative into a profound exploration of what it means to love someone.

A moving love story with an immediately compelling central premise, Every Day is also an elegant meditation on identity, consciousness, and kindness. Rhiannon and A meet when A inhabits the body of Rhiannon’s callous boyfriend, Justin. Eventually A reveals the nature of his/her existence (including that A has no fixed gender) and A and Rhiannon begin a unique relationship. David Levithan does a masterful job of exploring how the challenges they face—for instance, on one day, A wakes up in Rhiannon’s body—both strengthen their bond and threaten to tear them apart. A is a charming narrator whose nature brings him/her heartbreaking emotional pain as well as fascinating insight into the human experience: “I know it sounds like an awful way to live, but I’ve seen so many things. It’s so hard when you’re in one body to get a sense of what life is really like. You’re so grounded in who you are. But when who you are changes every day—you get to touch the universal more . . . You learn how much a day is truly worth, because they’re all so different.” Levithan provides empathetic glimpses into the lives of a wide variety of well-realized teenage characters, including a burly football player, a suicidal girl, and a studious boy named Nathan. After being inhabited by A, Nathan believes he has been possessed by the devil and joins a charismatic pastor in asking others who have had a similar experience to come forward publicly. This growing movement creates increasing tension throughout the novel and eventually gives A—and readers—a deeper understanding of A’s nature.

“A,” the narrator of Levithan’s brilliantly conceived novel, wakes up in a different sixteen-year-old’s body every morning and has to adjust to different physical characteristics, a different family, a different school, different friends. The process does have certain parameters. For instance, A always wakes up in bodies that match his/her (the protagonist is, in essence, gender neutral) age and never travels far geographically unless the host body does. A realizes that this way of life is unique, but over the years s/he has come to terms with it. “I’m never going to figure it out, any more than a normal person will figure out his or her own existence. After a while, you have to be at peace with the fact that you simply are.” But what happens when A falls in love? Levithan poses this question early in the novel and then shapes the narrative into a profound exploration of what it means to love someone. Before meeting Rhiannon, A responsibly tried not to make waves in his/her hosts’ lives, like a camper who leaves a campsite as clean as it was found. But now s/he “hijacks” bodies, making them drive to meet Rhiannon at parties and coffee shops. In one instance A strands a host, Cinderella-like, by the side of the road at midnight so that the boy awakens in his car, ranting that he was the victim of demonic possession. “I am not the devil,” A thinks. So who is s/he? What is his/her place in the world? Readers will savor every word of A’s attempt to figure that out. christine m. heppermann