Every Day by David Levithan

Cover via Goodreads.

Rating: 4/5 stars.

If you stare at the center of the universe, there is a coldness there. A blankness. Ultimately, the universe doesn’t care about us. Time doesn’t care about us.

That’s why we have to care about each other.

Every day, A wakes up in a different body. A different life. A has gotten used to it by now, but when he encounters Rhiannon, he finds himself falling in love – and farther away from what he’s ever known before.

Levithan just gets better and better. Boy Meets Boy and Love is the Higher Law failed to impress me, but after reading The Lover’s Dictionary and Every Day I can safely say I’m a fan of his. His writing has grown more gorgeous with each novel, and the quote above is one of the many that exemplifies it.

Plot-wise, Levithan focused on two main points in Every Day – A’s supernatural circumstance in which he wakes up in a new body every morning, and A’s romance with Rhiannon.

The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan

Cover via Goodreads.

Rating: 4/5 stars.

I seriously need a word for my signature squeal.

No, really. Sometimes when I read books like Gone With the Wind or Pride and Prejudice, I squeal. Well-written romance tends to do that to me. The Lover’s Dictionary did that to me.

Allow me to share one of my favorite entries.

“brash, adj.

‘I want you to spend the night,’ you said. And it was definitely your phrasing that ensured it. If you had said, ‘Let’s have sex,’ or ‘Let’s go to my place,’ or even ‘I really want you,’ I’m not sure we would have gone quite as far as we did. But I loved the notion that the night was mine to spend, and I immediately decided to spend it on you.’”

If computers could record squeals and send them to others’ screens and digital devices automatically, you would hear me squealing right now.

Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn

Cover via Goodreads

Rating: 3/5 stars.

This book was cute and funny, but failed to make me care about the actual characters as opposed to the things happening to them.

I liked the premise. Two unusual individuals communicate through a moleskin notebook and kindle an awkward romance – but meeting in real life brings a myriad of difficulties they never imagined. There were so many interesting ideas in this book: can love really bloom from interactions not taking place in real life? Should one should wait for love to come to them or actively pursue it? And what is love, to be exact?

The flaw that presented itself was the development of these themes – they could have been deep and introspective, but seemed shoddy and stale. Neither Dash or Lily grabbed my heart, and I could barely connect to them through all the random events taking place (for example, when Dash is attacked with snowballs by little kids while carrying a bag of yogurt).

Books from these two authors may not be my thing, but fans of David Levithan and Rachel Cohn’s previous works will probably enjoy Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares.

Love is the Higher Law by David Levithan

Cover via Goodreads

Rating: 3.5/5 stars.

This is a difficult book to rate with stars. I liked so many things about it; how one of the most traumatic events of this generation was explored, and yet the book was not dramatic itself, how through three teens’ perspectives the profound effects of 9/11 were pondered and reflected upon, and the relationships that formed between the characters themselves.

The only change I would have made was making the book more about the characters – their voices were authentic, and filled with wisdom people their age do not usually possess. Yet they seemed a little flat in the sense I could not fully empathize with them, even through what they had witnessed.

Probably my favorite novel by David Levithan so far.