6 Reasons You Need to Read Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon

Everything, Everything is a boy meets girl-next-door story, yes, but it’s also so much more; it’s a “girl explores the world beyond her comfort zone” tale, in which the stakes are extreme sickness and potential death. While Maddy is more vibrant and hopeful than you could imagine someone in her circumstances could be, meeting Olly is when she truly comes into herself. “It’s never felt like this,” a stunned Olly tells Maddy of their first kiss, and the same can be said for the novel: It defies expectations for a first-love YA. Here are six reasons you’ve got to pick up Everything, Everything.
The wonderful, unworldly, biracial protagonist
“I like to think that I’m an exact fifty-fifty mixture of my mom and dad,” Maddy says when she looks at herself in the mirror: Her skin mixes her mother’s olive complexion with her father’s darker skin, while her hair is “big and long and wavy,” combining their Asian and African heritages. Having only ever interacted with her mother and hispanic nurse Carla, she’s fascinated by everything about Caucasian Olly—including his penchant for parkour and his ability to execute a flawless handstand.
The illustrations that are vital to telling the story
Yoon’s husband, David Yoon, provided Madeline’s doodles, which complement her first-person narrative: Drawings of Maddy as an astronaut express her emotional state when she meets Olly and can suddenly see to infinity; her notebooks filled out with faux-experiments and diagrams (like her pre-kiss checklist) that ring so true to teenage journaling; even Olly’s orrery, so engaging as a drawing. Imprisoned as she is by her illness and her home, Maddy’s drawings leave no doubt that her imagination is uncontainable, irrepressible; the illustrations give us a chance to truly live in her head.
It’s all about taking risks
How can you make a story about first love feel as fresh as when the reader him/herself experienced it? By making every little moment a clear decision, every touch a life-threatening risk. Too scared to even hold hands, Maddy and Olly must at first get to know each other through 3 a.m. Instant Messenger sessions, then hangouts spent at opposite ends of the room. But anyone who has experienced this kind of attraction knows how difficult it is to hold yourself apart from someone when there’s such a magnetic pull. Is a kiss worth being exposed to the dangers of the outside world? It is according to Carla, who tells Maddy, “You’re not living if you’re not regretting.”
The mother/daughter relationship
All that Madeline has is her mother, and vice versa, after a car accident killed her father and brother when Maddy was an infant. And while, as a doctor, her mother is obsessed with ensuring her patient’s perfect health, it’s clear she also does everything she can to make her daughter’s life full, including movie nights and games of Fonetik Skrabbl. When Maddy does act out to become closer to Olly—not so unbelievable, for a lovelorn teenager—it cuts her mother deeper than it would if their lives, and their bond, were normal. But her mother’s generous response to Maddie’s heartbreak over Olly, saying “Tell me about him,” allows her daughter to finally express all of the pent-up emotions she’s been hiding. I couldn’t help it, I quietly cried while reading that part on the subway.
It’s so quotable
I don’t usually find more than one memorable quote in a YA book, but there were so many in Everything, Everything: “Wanting just leads to more wanting. There’s no end to desire.” “His body is his escape from the world, whereas I’m trapped in mine.” “I am made. I am unmade.” “We can have immortality or the memory of touch. But we can’t have both.” “Love can’t kill you.”

You can’t guess the ending
Having just read Leah Thomas’s Because You’ll Never Meet Me, which opens with two pen pals in similarly bleak situations as Madeline, I figured I could predict the direction of this book’s plot. For a premise with such tight parameters, it seems as if it can only go one of two ways, but instead, it veers off into another direction entirely. I loved how Yoon’s book, just like Madeline, re-formed itself into something new, making me reexamine everything (everything) I’d read before.
Everything, Everything comes out September 1 and is available for pre-order now.