Every Day by David LevithanEmber (Random House) 2013 (Originally Knopf, 2012)

(Note: throughout this post I’m going to use they/them/their as a singular gender-neutral pronoun. I known some people hate it, but I find it less clunky than “he/she” and “his/her” (which also implies a gender binary in a way I don’t necessarily think is appropriate here) and also less clunky than ze/hir.)

I like David Levithan a lot, but this is not my favorite book of his. The premise is interesting: A. wakes up in a different body every day. A. doesn’t know why it happens, or how, just that it happens: it’s been happening for their whole life, as far as they can tell. There are some things A. has figured out: they always wake up in the body of a person their own age, and they don’t travel large geographical distances unless the person whose body they’re inhabiting does. And it’s just for one day: at midnight, A moves on to a new body. A. has a personality of their own—I mean, A. is really pure personality, pure consciousness—but can also access the factual memories of the person whose body they’re in, so they know that person’s name, the names of that person’s family members, where that person goes to school, and so on. By age 16, A. is as used to the situation as they can be. But then one day, things change: A. meets a girl and falls for her and wants to see her again (and again and again). A. wants to be with this girl, Rhiannon, though obviously the logistics of A.’s existence make that challenging, at best.

So: the book gives us 40 days of A.’s life (well, the edition I read also had “Six Earlier Days” appended to the end), from the day they meet Rhiannon on. There’s the A./Rhiannon plotline, and also a plotline involving one of the other people whose body A. inhabited thinking A. is the devil, and then also the bits of all these people’s lives that A. sees/inhabits. This last bit is one of the book’s strengths, but also one of its weaknesses: at times it feels like a heavy-handed way to talk about various Serious Issues. A. wakes up in the body of someone addicted to drugs; A. wakes up in the body of a depressed girl; A. wakes up in the body of a mean girl who basically spends her days bullying everyone around her; A. wakes up in the body of a Spanish-speaking girl who works as a maid instead of going to school; A. wakes up in the body of someone who is a problem drinker. There was also one chapter that struck me as really horribly fat-phobic, when A. wakes up in the body of a dude who weighs more than 300 pounds. This, ugh: “his size comes from negligence and laziness, a carelessness that would be pathological if it had any meticulousness to it. While I’m sure if I access deep enough I will find some well of humanity, all I can see on the surface is the emotional equivalent of a burp” (270).

But still, there is plenty to like in this book. I like the way Levithan writes about sensations—kissing, running, swimming, climbing a mountain—the way he writes about the experience of being in a body. And he’s really good at writing about moments of connection, whether that’s A. and Rhiannon singing along to an apt Kate Bush song on the radio or dancing in a basement at a party or skipping school to have lunch together in a Chinese restaurant, or whether it’s A. in the body of a girl named Zara whose girlfriend snuck in her window to spend the night with her, or A. in the body of Holly, whose love moved far away, or A. in the body of Mark, whose best friend is suggesting that maybe they should be more than friends.