"A" awakens in a different person's body each day. One day, A might inhabit the body of a suicidal girl; the next, maybe an athletic boy. All A knows is that he/she must never get attached and never interfere with a body's life—and the body will never know.

The rules change when A wakes up as Justin. When A meets Justin's girlfriend, Rhiannon, their connection is instantaneous . . . and seemingly impossible to pursue. As A attempts to form a relationship with Rhiannon from within multiple bodies, A must convince her that the story of his/her life is real—and that he/she is a person she can love.

With Every Day, author David Levithan has given readers a genderless, faceless and virtually nameless protagonist who still manages to be endearing and emotionally resonant. And while the core question—can a love between a bodiless soul and a real human possibly work—captivates on its own, the novel's greatest strength lies in its ability to capture many different experiences of young adults. From stress to depression, from obesity to loneliness, the daily struggles of A's bodies transform this love story into a brilliant mediation on teen life.

Levithan (Boy Meets Boy, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist) is not timid about taking on unique storylines, but in Every Day he has created something totally new.

Is it possible to disregard someone's exterior to see—and love—that person's true, interior self? That's just one of the provocative questions Levithan (Every You, Every Me) asks in a novel that follows "A," who takes over the body of a different person each day at midnight. Right around A's 6,000th day on the planet, A meets Rhiannon—girlfriend of current host body Justin—and falls in love. A is careful not to disrupt the lives of the bodies he/she inhabits (A doesn't identify as male or female), but that starts to change as A pursues Rhiannon. Levithan sets up the rules of this thought experiment carefully: A only hops between the bodies of teenagers (who all live fairly near each other), and A can access their memories. As a result, the story unfolds smoothly (the regular shifts between bodies give the novel a natural momentum), but it's also less ambitious. Despite the diverse teens A inhabits, A's cerebral, wiser-than-thou voice dominates, in much the same way A directs the lives of these teens for 24 hours. Ages 12–up. Agent: Bill Clegg, William Morris Endeavor. (Aug.)

Gr 9 Up—Levithan uses a straightforward hook-a 16-year-old soul named A wakes up in a different teenage body everyday-to explore identity. While the mechanics of A's ability are intermittently examined, they quickly become the backdrop to the myriad lives A inhabits and the strong identity he (or she as A does not identify with either gender) has created to survive this transient existence. His strong moral code is based on respect for the person whose life he disrupts and the consequences he doesn't have to face. That code is challenged when he falls in love with a girl named Rhiannon after spending a day in the body of her slacker boyfriend, Justin. Complexities arise when one of A's subsequent hosts, Nathan, has an awareness that he was possessed (presumably by the devil), and the story goes viral. Navigating a new body daily while attempting to build a relationship with Rhiannon and make sense of his condition leads to many philosophical quandaries that Levithan infuses with intelligence and poignancy while remaining nondidactic. Indeed, every step of the narrative feels real and will elicit a strong emotional response from readers and offer them plenty of fodder for speculation, especially regarding the nature of love.—Nicole Politi, The Ocean County Library, Lavallette, NJ