What is Everything?
Everything, Everything is a book of emotion with love, heartbreak, and pain. This book, written by Nicola Yoon, is a Young Adult novel that captures the inspiring story of an 18 year old girl. In 306 pages, readers see how Maddy’s life can change at any second.
“Love can’t kill you,” or maybe it can. Maddy is a teenage girl who, for as long as she can remember, has never been outside of her home in California. She has a rare disease called SCID, which means that she is basically allergic to the outside world. For this reason, she has been stuck in her house for seventeen years.
Throughout these seventeen years, the only people that she has seen are her mom and her nurse. For most of her life, she has been closely monitored every day for any signs of health issues. And in those seventeen years, she never had a reason to leave her house. Until Olly appears.
Olly is the boy who moved next door, and from the first moment she saw him, she began to fall in love. For once in seventeen years, someone other than her mom and Carla began to make Maddy smile the way she did with them, and perhaps even more. With Olly, it is like the outside world is coming to her. With him, she breaks the rules and learns the truth that has been kept from her for her entire life.
Maddy knows that “he’s the biggest risk I’ve ever taken.”
At the beginning of the book, I thought that it was just a love story, but this book is so much more than that. It offers a glimpse into the life of someone who is very different from many readers. When I read about her illness, I felt grateful for the things I could do that Maddy couldn’t. As I got deeper and deeper into the text, I connected to Maddy. Whenever Olly texted her back, I felt happy and when he didn’t, I felt Maddy’s sadness. Overall, I thought this book was exciting due to Yoon’s carefully crafted dialogues, drawings, and scenes that make her readers quickly move through the text, always anxious to see what will happen next.
Everything, Everything is a book of many emotions where the reader can lose themselves in its pages for hours. The interactions between Maddy and Olly are something one can laugh at, romanticize, and even cringe at. However, these interactions shape Maddy and help her discover the truth about her life, and by reading this book, you will too.
This book will entertain readers from middle school to high school, and possibly even beyond. For people who enjoyed the movies To All the Boys I Loved Before and The Fault in Our Stars, I think that this book will definitely be worth the read. Even if you have not watched these movies, I think anyone can feel connected to this book and, through Maddy’s story, see the world in a different way.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
