Every You, Every Me by David Levithan (Nora)

Summary from Goodreads:

“In this high school-set psychological tale, a tormented teen named Evan starts to discover a series of unnerving photographs—some of which feature him. Someone is stalking him . . . messing with him . . . threatening him. Worse, ever since his best friend Ariel has been gone, he’s been unable to sleep, spending night after night torturing himself for his role in her absence. And as crazy as it sounds, Evan’s starting to believe it’s Ariel that’s behind all of this, punishing him. But the more Evan starts to unravel the mystery, the more his paranoia and insomnia amplify, and the more he starts to unravel himself. Creatively told with black-and-white photos interspersed between the text so the reader can see the photos that are so unnerving to Evan, Every You, Every Me is a one-of-a-kind departure from a one-of-a-kind author.”

Rating: 2 stars (only because I made it to the end)

David Levithan’s novels are usually sort of different and contemporary, but Every You, Every Me was the most extreme example of contemporary overkill I think I’ve ever encountered in literature. There’s only so much “new and fresh” that a book can take before it’s strange and pointless and this book had way way too much “new and fresh”. As I often say, this book has “reached the point at which it’s no longer OK”. I took one look at this book and not only did I not want to start it, but once I forced myself to start reading, I did not want to force myself to finish it. First thing that I hated about this book. The cover. I really can’t stand when book covers have upside down images or text. When I first saw this book I thought it was called Every You, Every You and I assumed if I flipped it over I would be able to read it backwards like a Japanese comic book or something like that. Extremely distracting and confusing. The second thing that I hated about this book were the crossed-out words. I can never decide if I’m supposed to read them or ignore them or glance at them without really taking them in. It chops up the sentences and makes it ten times harder to read the book which was already interrupted every few paragraphs by weird chapter markers such as 5C, 5D, etc. Last time I checked chapters either had titles (i.e. Chapter Twenty-Four of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows entitled “The Wandmaker”) or numbers (i.e. 1). And what is the point of having one paragraph long chapters? The photographs, supposedly an important part of the book, seemed completely random and I didn’t understand how the summary on the back of the book described at all what actually happened. Maybe I missed the point of Every You, Every Me completely and it’s genius, but in my opinion this book was what us kids would refer to as a “hot mess” (for an urban dictionary definition click here).

On sale: September 13, 2011