ARC | Book Review #47 – Another Day, by David Levithan

Hello dears!

Here’s my review for the new David Levithan book, Another Day.

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I know what you might be thinking, “Cat, why did you read this book if you didn’t like Every Day?”. Well, I had already requested this one on Netgalley and I felt like I had to keep my promise and read this one. I wasn’t excited and my fears turned out to be true. But first of all, please read my review for Every Day.

Like Every Day, Another Day is the story of A, a person who wakes up in a new body everyday. Everything changes when A falls in love with a girl, named Rhiannon. The different in this new book is that the story is told by the girl’s perspective instead of A’s.

This book is even worse than the first. Because it takes away all the interesting parts of A and their life in the bodies of all those different people and decides to focus on boring old normal teenage life of a girl who really has nothing interesting in herself in her existence. I thought that maybe getting a glimpse of whatever was inside her mind would made her a bit more fascinating but hell nope. Rhiannon still is one of the most boring characters I’ve ever read about. She’s so ordinary and plain. It didn’t captivate me to understand her or even care for her struggles with her life. So it practically made the job of reading this book completely pointless.

Basically, there’s not a lot of different scenes from the first book. All the scenes shared with A are the same. The new scenes are nothing special, turning this into a more typical YA book. At least with Every Day, we had the whole discovery of A’s condition, the whole sci-fi aspect. That was interesting. Here there’s only Rhiannon talking to her friends and making out with her boyfriend. Not interesting at all, at least for me.

I didn’t find the writing as beautiful as I did in Every Day. I don’t know if I just wasn’t paying that much attention or if it was in fact a bit inferior. I found the other book really quotable. Maybe it was due to A too. They are definitely a more poetic character than Rhiannon.

But the worst thing of all was the ending. It’s a bit more complex than in the previous book but it ends in some kind of “cliff hanger” that made me want to punch the screen of my tablet. Seriously, it’s that bad. What killed me is one simple sentence but it made everything even worse than everything until then. I feel like this story is not going to stop here and it annoys me a lot. It’s definitely over for me.

The thing I did appreciate was a deeper discussion on what it means to be a boy or a girl or none of those. I feel that that lacked in the first book and some of it was explored here. It’s a really interesting topic and it’s really cool that it is included in a book with a teen target audience. It’s definitely eye opening for some and helpful for others. Even thought the views of Rhiannon on it can be a bit closed minded sometimes, I blame it on lack of information. I think she understands the question better by the end of the book but still not completely. It’s something and, if it can be done for her, it can be too for a reader.

I think the existence of this book is totally useless. It only makes sense for one of these books to exist and Every Day is a bit more interesting, I think. With this new book, nothing is really added to the previous experience and, in my opinion, only ruins what was created before. So, if you have to read a book from this “series” (I’m not sure if it’s going to be a series or only a duology), don’t choose this one and go with Every Day.

I’m a bit disappointed with my whole David Levithan experience. I was really expecting a whole lot more. I still want to read some of his other books even though my interested was really pushed back. Please let me know what’s your favourite book of his.

My favourite quote was this one:

My life changes all the time, but books don’t change. Your reading of them changes–you can bring new things to them each time. But the words are familiar words. The world is a place you’ve been before, and it welcomes you back.

Anyway, this is just my two cents. Tell me your thoughts on both Every Day and Another Day, if you care to say so! I would very much like to know them!

See you next time,

Cat.