I have a complicated relationship with this book. Have you ever seen Love Actually? (I promise this story is going somewhere.) The first time I watched Love Actually I spent half the movie hoping that not every story would end with a happily ever after. And when some of the stories ended unhappily I was upset because the wrong stories ended unhappily. That’s how I feel about Every Day. I read the whole novel hoping it wasn’t going where I thought it was going and then when it went a different way I was disappointed because it wasn’t the way I wanted the story to go.The story itself is the weakest part of the novel to me. I don’t particularly like A as a character and it bothered me initially that there is no explanation given for how or why A jumps from life to life. I like the lives that A jumps into and their stories though, and I really like the idea behind the novel. The novel asks some big questions about love and life and identity. While that could come off as cheesy, I enjoyed thinking about the questions as they were raised more than I enjoyed reading the novel itself.The characters in the novel are diverse, which I liked. However, the book seems to have been written about a world that is perfectly accepting of all lifestyles (almost all his characters are treated the same regardless of sexual orientation, race, gender identity, class) unless you’re overweight. Now, I think it’s important to have positive representations of different races/classes/gender identities etc, but I also think it’s important to have realistic representations of all those things. We don’t live in a perfect world, and I wish Levithan had represented more of the real world problems that people encounter.Every Day is very readable (I finished most of it in one day), and I think it’s worth a read. Despite the weak plot and the (mostly) perfect world it takes place in, Every Day made me think a lot more than some other novels I’ve read lately. And that’s never a bad thing.ETA: The scene where A is in the twin football player's body... the second day, I think... and buys a coffee also made me really uncomfortable. It's pretty well established that his family is poor, and that A generally tries to be considerate towards the people A occupies each day. I know coffees don't have to be expensive, but I couldn't stop thinking that the money A spent on that coffee might have been missed by the football player the next day.
