Review
Remember that movie Groundhog Day? Remember how Bill Murray wakes up every single morning to discover that everything - from the date on the calendar to the song on the radio - is exactly the same? David Levithan's
Every Day shares a similar thoughtful playfulness about the fantastical predicament its protagonist - known only as A - encounters, but otherwise, the challenges A faces are exactly the opposite. You see, every morning when A wakes up, the world - or at least A's little corner of it - is entirely new. A wakes up in a different body every single day. It's been that way for A's entire life. A always occupies the bodies of people the same age (sixteen, now), and rarely travels outside the mid-Atlantic region. But other than that, A could - and does - wake up each morning in the body of anyone: a marathon runner or a drug addict, a teenage mom or a morbidly obese boy....
Beyond the Book
David Levithan might take an unusually philosophical approach to the idea of occupying someone else's body in
Every Day, but he's hardly the first person to explore it in fiction. Here are just a few other great examples, which run the gamut from light-hearted to more serious:
The classic book in the "body swap" genre is, of course,
Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers.
Originally published in 1972, the humorous story imagines what would happen if eternally bickering teenage daughter Annabelle Andrews switched bodies with her mother. The book has been adapted for the screen several times, and also sparked several sequels,...
