CBR5 #9 - every you, every me, David Levithan

About this time last year, I went on a trip with a very long plane ride. So long that the Valium only knocked me out for the first half. Because my sister could not stop talking about it, I had loaded the Mockingjay series on my Kindle and read the whole thing across two flights. Anyway, all that is explanation for the fact that my Kindle continues to suggest YA titles to me to this day. Most of the time I don't realize they are YA until I'm half way through them, so I guess it's pretty good YA titles it's suggesting. One of the authors I've discovered as a result is David Levithan. I ready every day a few months ago and now I just finished every you, every me.

The book was an experiment between he and a friend. The friend, a photographer, gave Levithan a different picture each week, or month - I can't recall - and David would write the story around the picture. He had no idea what he would get each week, and the friend didn't see anything he had written until he had a full draft. My best friend and I tried to do a similar things a few years ago, she would send me sketches or paintings and I would write something for it and then we would reverse it. We failed miserably mostly because we only exchanged materials twice. But it was a ton of fun and I'm about to call her and get it started up again.

The story that Levithan constructs around the pictures is fantastic. A boy, Evan, has lost a very important friend. That much is clear from the outset. He is also very, very sad and confused. The narrative is told from his perspective, and so dances around in his thought processes. Much of the text is written in strikethrough, which is the thoughts he tries to censor from his consciousness, or sometimes the things he wishes he could say but doesn't in a conversation. It's a brilliant way to demonstrate all the noise in this teenagers head. And there is a lot of noise. His absent best friend weighs heavily on him and his only confidant is her also hurting boyfriend, Jack. When the pictures start coming Evan and Jack are first drawn together to solve the mystery of who's sending them, and then torn apart by the same mystery. It's in the tearing that the story is strongest.

Anyone who has ever lost someone they really loved, whether they passed on or moved on, knows how deeply personal that emptiness feels. I think it's one of the few things that doesn't wane with age, loss like that is just as acute as an adult as it is for a teenager. In every you, every me, Evan's sense of loss is so acute that he struggles to get through regular day - to - day activities. Then the photos start appearing and the harder Evan tries to find out who sent him the photos, the more he learns about Ariel, his missing friend. It becomes apparent that Evan didn't know everything about her, because how could he? When Jack gets angry and tells Evan about the bad days with Ariel, Evan struggles to process this version of his friend. When they find pictures of her with people they don't know, they both have to reconsider what they thought they knew about Ariel. This revelation is especially hard for Evan, but eventually he realizes it means he's not totally alone. He feels his loss as only he can, but others are feeling it too. The same but different, for an Ariel that is the same, but different.