Author David Levithan is challenging all your ideas about identity. In the book Every Day, the author of seventeen books of fiction since 2003 including Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist is helping us to see the person inside, by repeatedly changing the outside. How can you know who you are when you inhabit a different body each day? The main character, “A”, wakes up each day in a different bed, in a different life. Think about what that must be like. Every morning you must quickly access that day’s person’s memories to find out what his or her situation is, who their friends are and what type of person they are. Always being careful to say the right things, act how they would act.Then you meet Rhiannon, you get to spend one day as her boyfriend, Justin. But you want more. So every day, no matter who you are, you come up with a way to spend more time with her. Every day a different gender, ethnicity, socio-economic class. Every day, you are somebody new. For one day each, you are the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess, and the criminal. Male, female, straight, gay, rich, poor. And every day, you are treated differently by those around you, but inside all those images and postures and labels, you are still you. This is the way you grew up and have always been, so who you are is not based on what you look like.
All the lives and lines are completely blurred in this thought-provoking teen book from 2012.
- Guest Blogger Mike S.
