Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon

I don't usually pick up romances. I have nothing against them except that I often find them rather boring. It is probably a deficiency in me. I have a student, Bella, who likes them though, and she told me to read Everything, Everything.

Everything, Everything is a book about Madeline Whittier, a girl whose lived in the same white room breathing filtered air her whole life. She never leaves because she was diagnosed with Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID) when she was a baby. She takes classes online and reads. If you think about narrative as a move from order (the status quo) to disorder (conflict), Madeline's life is very ordered.

Enter Olly. Olly is the mysterious boy literally next door. If Madeline's life is controlled and contained, Olly's is chaotic. He practices parkour and scales walls, sits on roofs and lives in the room with a window facing Madeline's. But this is the relationship that cannot be. They can never touch, even being in the same room with each other involves a decontamination process.

So being teenagers, they of course take the prudent course... yeah right. But I will say that Yoon gets mad props for most interesting use of a bundt cake in a narrative.

So, clearly Yoon has seen John Travolta in The Boy in a Plastic Bubble. While the premise is similar, the execution takes a hard shift about two thirds of the way through that I wasn't expecting. Overall, this was a good quick read. It features short chapters intermixed with illustration and graphic elements. The narrative is in the first person, from Madeline's point of view.

A pleasent way to spend an evening all told.