CBR#5 - #2 every day, David Levithan

There is something about the character of the observer. We accept, often times, a certain wisdom from characters we deem as true observers. Their understanding of the world being greater than their own experience by virtue of the fact that they absorb so much from those around them. They learn to know things, to understand gestures and nuance. They see the things we don't recognize we're doing. We accept that observers on some level know more than we do. Or, I guess at least, I accept all of this.

This is very important when it comes to Levithan's every day. A, the protagonist, is only 16 years old. However, due to the unusual circumstances of his life, he is an observer in the truest sense of the word, that fact makes his wisdom believable. And he is pretty wise.

A wakes up in the body of someone different every day. It's always someone his own age, but everything else is up for grabs. He handles it pretty seamlessly at this point, although the novel alludes to his struggles earlier in life. Those allusions are somewhat sparse, probably because the logistics of explaining how A survived his first few years might prove impossible and would certainly detract from the magic of the rest of the story. We meet A as he slides into Justin's body. A guy he instantly doesn't like. A does, however,  like Justin's girlfriend. And acting like a 16 year old, wise or not, he decides to break all the rules he knows about making his life work in order to be near her.

The rest of the book takes us through his daily experiences, waking in a different body each morning, and trying to figure a way to re-insert himself in Rhiannon's life. The more control he takes over the life he's in (cutting school, or making a promise, creating a memory the person may not remember the next day) the more trouble he leaves in his wake. As the book progresses, he is more and more desperate to make a life with Rhiannon and takes greater and greater risks with the bodies he has for a day.

The story is interesting enough, and one kid remembers feeling "possessed" by A and makes a lot of noise about it after A leaves him on the side of the road an hour from home and in trouble. It creates some good tension and sets A up to make some choices about what his life experience means.

The real story is in A's observations about each body and life he inhabits. The little markers he notices that allow him to immediately figure out the kid's situation. He reads behaviors and recognizes emotion etc. But most importantly his experience of have no body to which he is attached frees him from so much baggage that he has a clarity that seems so obvious when you're reading it, and yet, if it really were that obvious we'd have no bullies, no anorexia, etc. etc. etc.