Everything Everything by Nicola Yoon

Spoiler warning! This book has a major plot twist in the last chapter which is discussed here, so please don’t read ahead if you don’t want to be spoiled.

Maddy is allergic to the world. She hasn’t left her house in years, and her world consists of two people, her mum and her nurse, Carla. She doesn’t have an ounce of selfish ‘why me’ angst in her though, and lives a comfortable happy life of reading, working through online school courses, and movie nights with her mum.

Until Olly moves in next-door, and Maddy starts chatting online to him. He opens up an entire new world to her, and she sees what she’s been missing out on. Suddenly, the quiet life she’s living isn’t enough anymore. She wants to experience the outside world, with him by her side.

I started this novel with such high hopes. It was wonderful to actually relate to a teenage protagonist who had a chronic illness and lived a somewhat similar life to me. I also loved the layout of this novel. Incorporated within the story were graphs, lists, poems and art, adding such a unique personal level of creativity and insight into Maddys mind, and the chapters were short, keeping you racing through the pages quickly. I could look past the insta-love and a few illness-related plot holes I noticed, as it was just so good to finally read what felt like a wonderful book!

“My birthday is the one day of the year we’re both most acutely aware of my illness… another year of missing all the normal teenager things… another year of my mom doing nothing but working and taking care of me.”

Full of quotes that I thought I related to, you can understand my frustration when I found out the plot twist. In last few chapters, you discover that Maddys entire illness was simply made up. Her mother was suffering from a mental illness herself, and was trying to keep her daughter close after losing both her husband and son in a car accident. I felt my heart sink when I realised the easy way out was being taken. The romance again became the main focus and it became just another YA contemporary.

Three things authors do in novels with ‘sick’ main characters that annoy me.

-       Have the character die a tragic but martyred death

-       Have the character be cured and go back to living a normal life

-       Have the illness not actually exist in the first place.

Reading book after book with endings like these, it reinstates a negative feeling that a sick persons story is only ‘marketable’ if there is a dramatic ending to it. As a girl with an illness that is not terminal, but who will probably never be cured either, I wish there were more novels out there that illustrate living a fulfilled life alongside having an illness. Maybe this is just a final push to write my own novel. They always say to pen the book you want to read!