Every Me, Every You by David Levithan

It was your birthday.

Opening to

Every You, Every Me

by David Levithan

I should have reviewed this book the day after I finished reading it.  It was one of several that I grabbed off the shelf at my local library the day the TBR Double Dare ended April 1. I was attracted by the author, whom I've read before and enjoyed, and by the extensive use of very cool photographs throughout the book.

Yes, I picked it up because it has pictures.

I like the way Mr. Levithan mixed the use of narration and photographs in Every Me, Every You.   They give the novel a puzzle element that it wouldn't have had otherwise and struck me as a fresh idea.  (I know that several other authors have done this before, but this is the first time I've seen it in a Y.A. book, at least in this fashion.)

The book's narrator is a young man in high school who is facing life without his best friend, a girl whose absence is unexplained until near the end of the  novel.  In the novel's opening chapters, he finds a strange photograph of a familiar scene.  Who left it for him?  Is it just some sort of coincidence or is someone trying to tell him something?  Is that someone his missing friend?

As he book continues, he finds more photographs, some of which include pictures of his missing friend doing things he never knew she did, living a life separate from the one they shared.  

So I liked the use of photographs.

What I didn't like was the use of text that has been crossed out.  Much of Every Me, Every You features passages that have been struck through.  We're meant to know that the narrator decided he wouldn't include this information, but we get to see the information anyway.  This is not a new idea either, it goes back to Lawrence Stern's, Tristram Shandy, at least.   While the photographs added to my enjoyment of the novel, the crossed out passages annoyed me.  One clever device felt fine, two felt precious.  And I didn't think the fact that some passages were crossed out added to the overall mystery of the novel they was the photographs did.

And there's a third gimmick to Every Me, Every You, in that we don't know what happened to the missing best friend until the closing pages of the book.  We spend the novel wondering if she killed herself, if she was sent away for some reason, if she was the victim of a crime.  At the end of the day, making us wonder what happened to her should have some sort of emotional pay-off.  When I did finally find out what happened to her, it rang false to me and it made much of the preceding novel ring false as well.

These three devices, the photographs, the crossed out narrative, the unexplained absence,  pushed the book into too much narrative game playing when simply telling the story in a straightforward manner would have packed more emotional punch.

But I did like the pictures.