An interesting book. Not especially my genre. I wouldn't even call it fantasy because to me that's trolls and dwarfs and giants and all those characters that are like humans only a little different and that don't really exist. I wouldn't call it science fiction, either, because that means to me future technology and aliens. Maybe it's dystopian but it's not a different world, at least not for most of the characters.
This is about someone who we know can't exist, either, but the idea is just too captivating not to follow it. What if there were "beings" without a body who would go from one person to the next and live their life for one day? One such "being" is A who has lived 5994 days at the beginning of the book and 6034 at the end. Which means we accompany him/her on forty days of a very complicated life. As a boy he falls in love with this girl Rhiannon and tries to see her again. This changes quite some lives, the lives of the teenagers he or she is inhabiting on those days. We meet a lot of different people together with A and see how he gets to understand them, how he can live in them for only a short time but really jump in as if he'd been there all the time.
As I said, interesting concept, well written, certainly deserves to be a best-seller, especially for the "young adults" it has been written for because it pauses so many questions that ever teenager goes through. Who am I? Who am I really? How come I am not somebody else? What if I were a boy or a girl? What if I were adopted? What if I could live in someone else's body for one day?
This book was recommended to me by someone who is a lot younger than me. She claimed it was her favourite book ever. I would not go that far but, let me say, I understand her.
From the back cover:
"I wake up.
Immediately, I have to figure out who I am. It's not just the body - opening my eyes and discovering whether the skin on my arm is light or dark, whether my hair is long or short, whether I'm fat or thin, boy or girl, scarred or smooth. The body is the easiest thing to adjust to, if you're used to waking up in a new one each morning. It's the life, the context of the body, that can be hard to grasp.
Every day I am someone else. I am myself - I know I am myself - but I am also someone else.
It has always been like this."
Apparently, there is a "sequel" to this both "Another Day" which could also be called "The Story of Rhiannon" and a "prequel" called "Six Earlier Days" which talks about, well, six earlier days of the protagonist A.
I read this one too and found it very intriguing, how would you live your life if each day you were a different person?
ReplyDeleteThat's actually what I like about the book, it gets you thinking about all these different possiblities, challenges but also the disadvantages. And it certainly is great for young people who still don't know what to do with their lives.
DeleteHave a good reading week,
Marianne