Every day is the same for Rhiannon. She has accepted her life, convinced herself that she deserves her distant, temperamental boyfriend, Justin, even established guidelines by which to live: Don’t be too needy. Avoid upsetting him. Never get your hopes up.
Until the morning everything changes. Justin seems to see her, to want to be with her for the first time, and they share a perfect day—a perfect day Justin doesn’t remember the next morning. Confused, depressed, and desperate for another day as great as that one, Rhiannon starts questioning everything. Then, one day, a stranger tells her that the Justin she spent that day with, the one who made her feel like a real person…wasn’t Justin at all.
In this enthralling companion to his New York Times bestseller Every Day, David Levithan tells Rhiannon’s side of the story as she seeks to discover the truth about love and how it can change you.
My review:
4/5
Such a great companion (or twin, as Levithan would say)!
I loved the idea behind Every Day and Another Day. While you might think these books are about what it's like to change bodies every day, it's actually much more about how it is to love someone for who they really are, and how hard it is to forget about what you see. It's something I've always thought about, because our society is becoming more and more open about homosexuality and transgenders - and much more people who simply can't fit into any category we have. Because this is how we live. We see someone and we immediately have to put tags on them: boy or girl? good-looking or not? straight or not? smart or not? nice or not? cool or not? Once you've grown up living like this, it's incredibly hard to get over this habit, which is what Rhiannon's going through in this book. In reality, you can't always fit into one category, and as fine as we can be about it, there'll always be difficulties when you're trying to live that way, as stupid as they can be. I really liked how these novels made me think about issues like this and how I would react if it were happening to me, because I truly got a life lesson out of reading them.
I am really glad I could read this book. While I didn't expect a companion novel, I can now see how necessary it was to completely grasp the meaning of the story. There's so much difference in how you and another person can see a single event, so the full story can have much more meaning from one perspective than another. I read Every Day a very long time ago, so I remember the biggest part of the story, but not the specific details. However, there were many things I remembered from A's perspective that weren't mentionned in Another Day, which is why I would recommend reading both books in the order they came out, because I really liked comparing both and knowing some details unknown by Rhiannon in this book.
In this book, we can find the same characters there are in Every Day, only slightly more centered around Rhiannon's life. I loved many of her friends, because I thought they were honest and very kind to her, no matter how lost she is at some points in this book. They are true friends and I was happy to discover more details about them than I had in Every Day. I also really enjoyed getting to know A from Rhiannon's perspective, because without the explanations given in the original novel, his actions can be seen very differently. My only complain is that this way, A sometimes seemed more annoying and persistent then loving and determined, but in the end I could see why he would act this way. If someone were to act like this because of their feelings for me, I would be very touched, because A's actions speak more loudly than his words most of the time. Rhiannon is a great character, with all her strenght and her capacity to see things as they really are. The way she handles everything impressed me, because she never wants to lie to herself and she allows herself to see things positively, even though it can be hard sometimes. I definitely started to like her even more in this book, because her reasons for acting like she did are pretty much all really good and she's a good person, all this while being a simple teenager.
I adored the way this novel was written. It's fluent and clear, but it's also beautiful and it made me think, analyse and feel everything, just as it should. I don't remember much of Every Day's writing, but I know for a fact that I loved Another Day's. I think Levithan did a wonderful job of telling another side of his story and it couldn't have been done any better. There had to have been a lot of thought behind every action and it's clearly been done, because everything fits so perfectly with what remembrance I had of Every Day. By this point, I don't know if I have convinced you to read this novel, after having read the first one, but let me tell you this: you need it, wether you know it or not. It will make your previous read a whole lot better.
However, there's something about the ending that makes me wonder a lot about what happens afterwards, so if you have read Another Day, I need to know what you think about it. Please!
Overall, I would recommend this novel a billion times. I know it can be read before the first one, or even on its own, but I seriously think it's better to read it the way it was published.
(Thank you NetGalley for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.)
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