Review: Every You, Every Me
RATING: 2/5
I decided to give this book a shot since David Levithan wrote it and I'm in love with him. I heard that it was not good but wanted to be the judge of that. I see where people are coming from when they say it's bad, but I still found it readable.
It's a mystery that keeps you intrigued and wanting to know how it ends. The main character keeps finding pictures left for him of him and his missing friend. He drags another friend into the mystery, the ex boyfriend of the missing friend, and together they try to figure out who's leaving them these pitcures.
It's a very depressing read. This teenager is just full of angst that it gets very annoying very fast. There's a lot of talk about depression and suicide and it's all very hard to read.
The way it was chaptered was also very strange. There would be 1B, 1C, 1D etc; sometimes chapters went onto letters like N. I saw no point in this style.
A style of writing that David uses is struckthrough words, to represent how the main character's thinks and rethinks his thoughts. It's kind of cool, but also makes reading the book very obnoxious, especially when sometimes there are multiple sentences or small paragraphs that are crossed out.
The way the book was written was that photographer Jonathan Farmer would send David one picture at a time. David would write the story around the picture, meaning the progession of the book was not planned and therefore, seems to be kind of random and tossed together. It's an interesting writing exercise, but not the best for a novel.
The ending basically still left a lot of things unresolved and I was disappointed at how anticlimitic it was.
Overall, it was interesting to read because of the writing style and visuals. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great enough to recommend to others. If you're interested, then give it a shot, as it's a quick read anyways. But if not, you're not missing out.
