Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon
This book is: strong and sweet and amazing.
Other elements: the nature of love, finding yourself, the purpose of life.
Read it: if you love solidly written stories about vivid characters.
Overall rating: 9/10
Everything, Everything is a story about an eighteen year old girl who suffers from a rare disease has kept her in the same room for 17 years. She doesn’t seem sick – and she isn’t, most of the time. But if she went Outside, she could die.
Everything, Everything is a story about a young woman who is sick, but it doesn’t follow the classic sick lit formula of introduce characters, get you attached to them, then kill one or both of them and that’s what the story is about. It’s about a girl who happens to be sick, and what happens in her life.
I read Everything, Everything in two sittings: the first night, I read until something mind-boggling happened and I needed a break to absorb it. I finished it the next day, in about 45 minutes. It is quick and bright (but does tug on the heartstrings).
When I describe this book to friends, I explain it by saying it that I loved it in the same way that I loved Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl (an all-time favorite). It’s another book in that oddly specific subcategory of YA that is about young women who experience love for the first time while also – and more importantly – figuring out who they are and who they want to be.
Maddy is a brave, unique heroine I won’t soon forget meeting. This is one of the 10 or so books I read this year that I finished and immediately thought, “I need to own this so that I can read it again.”
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