EVERYTHING, EVERYTHINGby Nicola Yoon
Publication date: 3rd September 2015
Published by Corgi Childrens
Pages: 306
Source: Free from Random House Children's Publishers (work experience)
Amazon | Waterstones | Goodreads
Blurb from Goodreads:
My disease is a rare as it is famous. Basically, I'm allergic to the world. I don't leave my house, have not left my house in seventeen years.
But then one day, a moving truck arrives next door. I look out of my window, and I see him. He's tall, lean, and wearing all black - black T-shirt, black jeans, black sneakers, and a black knit cap that covers his hair completely. He catches me looking and stares at me. I stare right back. His name is Olly.
Maybe we can't predict the future, but we can predict some things. For example, I am certainly going to fall in love with Olly. It's almost certainly going to be a disaster.
Review:
It was kind of hard to resist reading this book. I'd heard about it so many times - first on Goodreads, then on Twitter, then on Facebook, and so by the time I got given a free copy by the lovely Publicity team at my work experience, I couldn't wait to get into it!
Let's get the obvious out of the way first - there's a LOT of similarities with The Fault in Our Stars. Madeline's sick and is going to be for her whole life, she loves books, her mum is her best friend and her love interest Olly (like Augustus) is way, way more daring than her. Like Hazel, Madeline's illness has taught her not to expect too much from the world - and then Olly moves in next door and totally blasts that theory apart.
So sure, there are quite a few similarities. But that can be forgiven for two reasons. Number one - they make sense. It makes sense that someone who can't go out a lot or spend a lot of time with other people would be more interested in books than the average, and have a really close relationship with their mum. Number two - this book does so, so many things different to The Fault in Our Stars. There are the two sentence long chapters (better than it sounds). There are the chapter breaks made up of print outs of Maddy and Olly's emails, Maddy's fake (but , I think, pretty inspired) definitions of words she encounters, and diagrams of her secret projects. When I first started reading, I thought that Maddy's character wasn't really too well defined - I didn't feel as though I knew her. I felt like there wasn't enough description of her character at the start. But all these extra little bits thrown in and spaced out throughout the book definitely, definitely changed my opinion on that - and it kinda felt more rewarding, too.
It was about half way through the book that it really, really won me over. It's got to be a credit to Nicola Yoon's writing that, when so much of the action happens in one room, in one house, she keeps our attention sustained so well. I had to finish it, and I did - in less than two hours. I couldn't help it. It's effortless to read. Reading this book felt, to me, like curling up in front of the fire with a big, fluffy cat. It's about first love, yet it's never too much or cringey - awkward in places, sure, but when is first love not?
Maddy is such a likeable character. Olly is, too - but I feel as though his character was just the tiniest, tiniest bit underwritten. He didn't feel three-dimensional enough for me to really get invested in his character. Nevertheless, the dialogue is great, the descriptions are great, and its, in general, just a really sweet and quirky book. It's full of teenage hope and finding yourself out and doing things for the first time - and Maddy's definitely got a lot to catch up on.
I can definitely see why there is so much hype surrounding this book at the minute. Anybody who likes YA romance - this is undoubtedly the next book for you.
Rating: 7.5/10.
