Another Day is the same story but told from Rhiannon’s POV. We get to see her home life and more of her relationships with her friends and Justin. We also see the internal struggle she has when she tries to reconcile her rubbish relationship with Justin, who is the same person every day, with her potential relationship with A, who has the amazing personality but is never the same physical person twice.
There is a lot of discourse about the nature of attraction - how and why we are attracted to people, why we automatically discount other people purely based on their looks. As a narrator, Rhiannon is refreshingly honest: she openly admits that she isn’t attracted to A when A is in a girl’s body.
The plot follows the same path as Every Day and there were overlaps, which is par for the course in a companion novel. There was still enough in Rhiannon’s non-A life to make it interesting and there was an interesting plot twist literally in the last sentence that has made me hopeful for a third instalment!
One of the things I love about David Levithan is that he can write secondary characters that have depth but don’t take the whole story over. He is sparing but meaningful with his descriptions and interactions and I ended up really caring about Rhiannon’s friends. I was ridiculously pleased that Preston got an HEA!
I found it harder to connect with Rhiannon than I anticipated, but I think most of that stemmed from the fact that Rhiannon doesn’t really connect with anyone. She’s kind of drifting through her life and her only anchor seems to be her mean boyfriend. She has low self-esteem, which is so sad because reading between the lines (and you do really have to read between the lines - David Levithan doesn’t really go in for the whole Special-Snowflake ‘I think I’m ugly but boys just keep asking me out!’) she is moderately intelligent and attractive. I spent a lot of the book wanting to bang my head against the table because she was just putting up with Justin the Knob and making excuses for his sullen, passive-aggressive behaviour.
She goes through the entire book (and about a year of her life before the story starts) in this going-nowhere relationship with an emotionally vacuous boy who doesn’t really see her, or care if she’s there or not. Their perfunctory sex is the only time he shows her a modicum of emotion and she’s constantly fretting in case he tells her off for being clingy. Her friends spend a good proportion of their time trying to get her to take her blinkers off, but she brushes their concerns away with a ‘You just don’t understand our relationship’ and by explaining that Justin really isn’t that bad because at least he doesn’t abuse her. Well, to paraphrase the excellent Chris Rock, he’s not SUPPOSED to abuse you, you low-expectation-having motherfucker!
Despite these frustrations with Rhiannon, I did still really enjoy Another Day. At the end of the day, it’s written by David Levithan so it’s never going to be a bad book - the man could write a shopping list and still manage to include at least seven astute observations about the state of the human race.
Obviously there are going to be comparisons between Another Day and Every Day and people will ask whether Another Day is ‘as good’. Well, it’s different. It’s definitely good. Did I enjoy it as much as I enjoyed Every Day? It was close, but I preferred A’s viewpoint and the extra helping of fantasy that the first book included. Is Another Day worth reading anyway? Absolutely.
4 stars
I received a copy of Another Day in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to Egmont and Netgalley.