This week' novel is Every Day by David Levithan. Warning up front: this made me crazy uncomfortable and I'm going to rag on it, which I generally try not to do.
"A" wakes up every morning in a new body, borrowing someone else's life for the day. They try to stay respectful, interfering in their host's life as little as possible. But when A falls for Rhiannon, they break all their rules to try to be with her.
The neat parts of this book are the short glimpses into A's hosts' lives. The situations are varied and interesting, despite or because of their brevity. They range from the girl who has to cover for her brother's fist fight with his dealer, to the home-schooled boy who goes to the library to escape his overbearing mother, to the girl who was so hung over she couldn't remember what she did the night before to traumatize her parents, to the undocumented maid who cleans houses every day. It's neat to see how all these different people live their lives and how an outsider deals with taking control of them. I kept turning pages, wanting to read the next chapter, because each day ends either in hope that the next day would be better or disappointment that the day has to end. I needed to know where A went next.
A jumps through races and genders and socioeconomic stats with some neat things to say about how at the heart of it people are all the same. A identifies as genderless, of course, and is attracted to any gender regardless of the body they inhabit. There's a great moment when they jump into the body of a trans boy and there's so little drama about it that it's fantastic. There's a great moment where they jump into a severely depressed girl, and there's a statement about how depression is an ailment of the body rather than an emotional state, so A can feel it.
The jarring exception to this is when A jumps into an overweight boy and not only is the whole day about how overweight the guy is, with no other signs of a life outside of that, but Rhiannon is disgusted and A is disgusted, and A looks into the kid's memories and determines that the kid is overweight because he's lazy. Just...Whoa. I'm not informed enough on this issue to comment at length, but this feels wrong.
Then there's the love story.
Aww geeze, the love story. It is so uncomfortable, I can't stand it.
First, A falls in love immediately, even though they've sworn to keep everyone at a distance to avoid getting too close to people they'll never see again. (I call bullshit on this pledge of non-interference, because in the 40 odd days this book covers, A drastically derails at least seven people's lives, and those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.) And the part that gets under my skin is that A is attracted to Rhiannon after seeing that she's downtrodden. She tries to make herself smaller, and she defers to what other people want. It's gross that A is drawn to that.
A then proceeds to show up at her school uninvited because they "need to see her." Come on, A! That is stalker level crazy! And you "need to see her"? Well, she needs to go to class, but I guess her education and attendance record come in second to whatever you want to do at the moment. (And this is not even getting into how A has whoever they're possessing at the moment skip half of school and come home late to dinner so they can drive a couple hours to where Rhiannon lives.) Even when Rhiannon expressly tells A that she needs space to think, A shows up or demands she meet them, repeatedly derailing her life and not listening to her. Just pushing and pushing and pushing, ignoring that she's uncomfortable.
Rhiannon also makes it clear that she's only attracted to boys, but A keeps insisting that she should look past that, and that they're the same on the inside no matter what the outside looks like. She just needs to open her mind! No. This feels a lot like "if you just tried harder, you could not be gay!" and that is unacceptable, because sexual orientation is not a choice.
There's a point when A asks the girlfriend of the person they're possessing at the moment if she would still love them if they were in a different body every day. She responds that she would love them if they were male or female or weighed a thousand pounds or had horns. Instead of taking from this that there are people out there who would love them, A takes it as proof that Rhiannon could change if she just tried. No. Just no. Stop that.
A is genderless, but they are such a bro.
It's so gross, and it's so dangerous to romanticize a toxic relationship like this. A lot of the harassment A pulls in this HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE to REAL TEENAGERS and it is NOT OKAY. It's especially awful since the narrative is set up to try to make the reader sympathize with A and feel annoyed that Rhiannon is being so difficult.
Ugh. I'm going to go take a shower and find out if Quantum Leap is on Netflix.
***
Next week: The Forgetting, YA fantasy/sci-fi by Sharon Cameron.
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