I found the premise quite clever: some sort of entity leaps from one body to another, once a day. Only bodies of the same age; in the book the entity "A" is 16, so all the people he jumps into are 16. For that day he has total control over them and "access" to their memories, but not their emotions about those memories. It basically gives a way to see the world through the lens of different genders, races, classes, sexualities, mental states, and addictions.

As it progresses the story kind of falls apart, but it is overall an interesting concept.

It was only some time after I read the book that I realised it's not really an original concept, it's basically Quantum Leap, except the leaper is 16 and mostly doesn't try to make things better (and as things progresses sometimes messes up the lives of the bodies he occupies). ( )

The story is immediately intriguing, because you can't tell where it might go. The protagonist is a singular person and yet, above singular. I usually read faster than this (eight days) but I couldn't rush this at all. I won't go into any detail. Just, if you're unsure, go get the free sample from amazon. See if it yanks you in like it did me. I guess it's marketed as young adult, but don't let that fool you. It's a smart, savvy book by an accomplished writer, using a premise I've seen used in disappointing ways, but Levithan uses it like a scalpel, or a Klieg light. Or a gentle kiss.

This is an emotionally perfect novel. You'll have to read it to understand what I mean by that. ( )

[b:Every Day|13262783|Every Day (Every Day, #1)|David Levithan|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1356993940s/13262783.jpg|18464379] is a peculiar book with a very original theme - a book about a character who wakes up in the body of a different person every day. One day A, our main protagonist, might be a boy who treats his girlfriend badly, another day A might wake up as a girl addicted to drugs ... but whatever the body A awakens in is like, A's mind always remains the same. A grows with the experiences, learns the same things others do ... only A has to adapt to different environments, A has to learn that there is nobody who will ever accompany A on the way through a difficult life which will never allow A to settle down in one specific body, no matter how hard A longs for such an experience.

“I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.”
Isn't it incredibly sad to imagine having to live a life the way A has to? And yet A managed to find a way to embrace the possibilities life has to offer, to accept this fate and still remain A's own self.

A is genderless, though the topic of gender has been ignored by Levithan throughout most of the book, and even if the topic was close to being brought up, the author quickly managed to drift around it. Levithan's presumable uncomfortability with discussing gender as a part of A's identity disappointed me, just like the author's decision to let another plot point fall aside at the end of the novel - a plot point which had originally raised my interest, only to be dropped almost immediately.

This is a story about a person's love for somebody else, a love which cannot be broken even by something as insurmountable as what A has to experience. Usually, I'm not a fan of romance stories. A lot of them are either more about the sexual aspects (a trend fed by recent successes such as Fifty Shades) or are cheesy and a tad too unbelievable to be true (hello, Mr. Sparks). David Levithan jumped on the bandwagon with Nicholas Sparks and created a perfectly cheesy love story, with the girl A falls in love with being the kind of person all of us have already met - there was nothing surprising or too interesting about her. Yet, for some reason, the author made me not mind this fact at all, and I found myself enjoying this book immensely after my initial doubts about whether or not Levithan would succeed in making me care about A's fate. He did.

Apparently, there are a lot of mixed opinions for this novel, so if you are interested in the concept of the story, I'd recommend giving it a try. Fast-paced and built upon an interesting premise, this will probably not turn out to be a book you'll regret having read. ( )

I loved the concept and it was mostly well done, but the end...huh? What the heck happened? I didn't get it, maybe because I listened instead of read. ( )

I really loved this book. The only thing keeping me from giving it five stars is I was hoping to close the book with a better understand of the "why" of the situation. I almost felt like the end could lead to a sequel, but I'm not sure if that's the case or not. And I'm not sure if I'd want that because the rest of the story felt very resolved...not sure I'd want to revisit it again in any other way but to get more answers about "why" A was like this.

I really LOVED some of the social commentary about how the rest of us (who don't switch bodies daily) do put so much weight on physical appearance and on gender definitions before we can truly love the inner person. I liked how difficult that was for A to understand. And I liked how sad he was when he realized it was affecting him too...once he started worrying about how someone would see him.

This was a really great book. I definitely recommend it. I devoured it in one sleepless night. ( )