Comments on: every Unwholly day

By: Miss Print

Miss Print — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 05:03:42 +0000

I really need to read more Shusterman (meaning any Shusterman) books.

Here I was ready to chime in with issues I had with Every Day but everyone beat me to it. I agree with a lot of the comment complaints. I will say that I enjoyed the writing and thought it was handled well–I think the quality of the writing and the scope of character/hosts is why it’s so easy to see all of the problems this one has. So much is done well that the flaws are even more obvious.

By: Karyn Silverman

Karyn Silverman — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 20:56:25 +0000

I’m with Miriam in that I did find many of the hosts sympathtically portrayed, but agree with Mark that the choice to have A disgusted only once, and to have that host be the fat host, because size is the one thing it’s acceptable to hate on — that was a very problematic choice. Had there been more than one host A had trouble understanding, this would not have seemed like a statement, but because it’s the only time, it does come across that way.
My bigger concerns all had to do with plot — I did mostly enjoy reading this, but the entire pastor who is another bodiless soul plotline struck me as all kinds of artificial (and not at all well-meshed with the Rhiannon story). And the love story in general makes no contextual sense — hasn’t A been in the bodies of people with significant others before? And isn’t love at first sight all about pheromones and physical chemical responses, making it almost absurd for a person unencumbered by a body?
I think this is in many ways an important book, but feels a bit purposeful and occasionally clumsy in how the purpose is explored. I like it less every time I discuss it with anyone — this is a book that I think falls shorter on revisiting.

By: J Curry

J Curry — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 19:40:57 +0000

Amen, Mark Flowers! Everything you say is on target about this book. I had trouble with the “science” behind it, too (or lack, thereof, as you point out). I didn’t understand how A could not only be sane and functioning, but how he/she could be so much wiser than his/her peers. I found A to be patronizing at best, and a creepy stalker at worst.

The idea itself is not original. It was used years ago in an old TV show called Quantum Leap. Except there, the main character acquired the ability to jump into other people’s bodies as an adult, so he wouldn’t have had the psychological issues a person in A’s situation would have had. Every Day just seemed like lazy writing to me.

By: Miriam

Miriam — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 19:39:21 +0000

I’m also with Mark.

I just finished this yesterday, and while I found it fascinating–and unlike Mark I did find it compelling in the way it dealt with mental health, drug abuse, and portraying many QUILTBAG characters–overall I found it frustrating, depressing (and not cleansing-depressing, like A Monster Calls or ultimately-uplifting depressing, like

By: H. Munca

H. Munca — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:22:27 +0000

Mark I had the same reaction about it not mattering to a baby who takes care of it! Anyone with even a nodding acquaintance of attachment theory is going to look askance at that one, surely. That, among other things, put a bad taste in my mouth just for the psychology of the whole book. If A has literally changed hosts every single day since infancy, I wasn’t buying A having such a cohesive self.

And I dunno, maybe expecting realism in that arena is missing the point somehow, but I couldn’t enjoy this book on the metaphoric level without it.

By: TeenReader

TeenReader — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 03:07:03 +0000

I agree with Mark’s second complaint. While it would be hard to do this for EVERY character, the hosts seemed incredibly shallow and contradicted one of the themes of A getting a full understanding of many different lives. Also, the sentence-level writing was “meh” for me. I mean, it certainly was not awful, but i was never wowed like BRIDES OF ROLLROCK ISLAND, THE FAULT IN OUR STARS, or even BOMB. The book was very readable, and the basic concept is cool, but I just don’t see this going the distance as far as LITERARY quality goes.

By: Mark Flowers

Mark Flowers — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 22:37:06 +0000

Unlike my objections to some of the other books we’ve discussed, I actually think that Every Day is an outright BAD book. The surface level writing was good, and the premise was neat, and it was really easy to read, so I can see why people were entertained by it, but if you dig down a layer or two, I found the whole thing to be a mess start to finish because Levithan’s gimmick (as cool sounding as it is) just doesn’t hold water for a real, emotional plot. Starting with the business about how he was raised–I just simply can’t believe that anything like a sensitive, thoughtful human being could be the end product of a childhood in which he had a different set of parents every single day (I know – some of you are yelling at me again about suspension of disbelief, and I might just have been able to suspend it, if Levithan hadn’t explicitly had A try to explain that, basically, it doesn’t matter to a baby who takes care of it – which, is–especially for me as a parent of young children–just simply insulting).

But setting aside this basic implausibility, then, if A’s been spending all these years trying so hard to take care of his “hosts”, why does he throw that all out the window after meeting Rhiannon? Love at first sight? If that was the answer, he certainly didn’t sell it. He tells us how much he cares about being careful but the whole book is comprised of a month and change where he does nothing but take risks with his hosts. This is, of course, especially true of the very end, where he decides to basically kidnap his “host.”

Insulting is the word of this post, because there were at least two other aspects of the book that I found incredibly insulting. 1) The ending, in which A sets up Rhiannon with another guy who A thinks is sort of like the person he would be if he had a body. In other words – here you go, Rhiannon, you obviously need a guy to get you through this situation
and nice guys are just interchangeable, anyway. 2) I am 100% sure that Levithan intended the opposite of this, but my reaction as a reader was that he was frequently insulting to the issues the “host” bodies had. This was most explicit with the overweight kid, who Levithan goes out of his way to show both A and Rhiannon openly disgusted by. But the drug user, the “mean girl” and many others were sketched out to be just as stereotypical as possible. The premise could have been used to actually show A trying to understand how various different types of teenagers think, and why people are so different, instead, each “host” was just a set of obstacles to getting to the unconvincing love story.

I have even more complaints about this one, but I’ll leave it at that for now.