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janie_books's review against another edition
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
Honestly, I was bored. I read this in a single sitting so I could say I've read it, but mostly to get it over with. Maybe if I hadn't already known the ending, I would have enjoyed it better, but since I haven't enjoyed Yoon's other books, I wouldn't count on it.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual content
simobae's review against another edition
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
books_inthewild's review against another edition
5.0
An absolutely exuberant five stars!
I can’t believe I had never read this book yet….!
I LOVE Maddy- she’s brave, positive, independent, kind, emotional, sensitive, strong. She’s the perfect main character, and I loved seeing her life unfold. Olly is dreamy, adventurous, outgoing, sensitive, funny, and just the perfect “love interest”.
Seeing Maddy grow, explore new feelings of love, and hope for more for her life was just so beautiful.
I hope to watch the movie next!
I can’t believe I had never read this book yet….!
I LOVE Maddy- she’s brave, positive, independent, kind, emotional, sensitive, strong. She’s the perfect main character, and I loved seeing her life unfold. Olly is dreamy, adventurous, outgoing, sensitive, funny, and just the perfect “love interest”.
Seeing Maddy grow, explore new feelings of love, and hope for more for her life was just so beautiful.
I hope to watch the movie next!
elisemariiieee's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.5
kim_j_dare's review against another edition
4.0
Fans of [b:The Fault in Our Stars|11870085|The Fault in Our Stars|John Green|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1360206420s/11870085.jpg|16827462] are going to love this. It's utterly engaging, and Nicola Yoon writes with a sureness and a voice that makes me hope that she's got lots of other books lined up. Madeline was completely charming, I adored her intellect and her bookish nature, and I enjoyed the layers that Yoon built into the story. I didn't love the last 40 pages so much-- they take things in a direction that's too neat and too Hollywood, and while I like things tied up with pretty bows, I think it would have been a more interesting story if the trajectory had been allowed to run its course rather than veering off in a completely different direction. But that's not the story she chose to tell, and I'll take the ending she gave us because, as stated, I am a newly proclaimed Nicola Yoon fan for life.
My favorite couple of lines from the story-- Madeline's "spoiler review" of [b:The Little Prince|157993|The Little Prince|Antoine de Saint-Exupéry|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1367545443s/157993.jpg|2180358]:
Love is worth everything. Everything.
Thanks, NetGalley, for the digital ARC.
My favorite couple of lines from the story-- Madeline's "spoiler review" of [b:The Little Prince|157993|The Little Prince|Antoine de Saint-Exupéry|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1367545443s/157993.jpg|2180358]:
Love is worth everything. Everything.
Thanks, NetGalley, for the digital ARC.
gilmoregirl1220's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
crbrodie's review against another edition
2.5
Not a book I think I will ever read again sadly but it's not a bad book! Firstly it was insta-love which I'm not really a big fan of but I liked the message of the story and also the layout of the book made it interesting to read.
ijm's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
halthemonarch's review against another edition
2.0
I loved this book.... I *LOVED* this book and then it let me down. I was sucking it up ten chapters at a time, almost done from the time I got it (early morning at farmer’s market) to the end of my shift that evening. I finished it the next morning to uncover the twist that changed the game....
Everything, Everything is about a girl, Madeline Whittier who has the infamous bubble person disease or SCID in the medical world. Her nurses, mother, and visitors must be sterilized in a special way and limit the amount of touching prior to certain screenings. She’s been sick her whole life and her mother, a doctor, really only found out after running extensive tests on her when she was five months old when she kept getting sick. This was one month after a tragic accident that took the life of Madeline’s father and brother and although she was too young to remember them, the ghost of their presence lingers in her mind. From the settlement Madeline’s mother’s able to afford the works and sets them up comfortably in southern California. Next door in their secluded neighborhood mooves manic pixie dream boy Oliver “call me Olly” Bright and his family, Alt sister who smokes, weepy mom, and asshole drunk dad.
Olly and his sister Kara come over with a bundt cake and want to meet Madeline because Olly saw her watching from the window, but Mom tells them to go away. Ugh. In retrospect it's no wonder Maddy feels the way she feels at the end. Maddy and Olly hold up signs and exchange email handles, then begin to communicate with each other. Conversations of “No I’m not grounded” and “My favorite song is...” turn into “I’m sick” and “My family’s kind of broken but I’m making the most of it. They get close and the super cool Nurse Carla begins to sneak him in after decontaminating him in secret. Mom finds out and completely explodes when she gets hip, but by then Madeline has kissed the boy and experienced the fire that comes with being with him. She explores the ides of wanding more when desire could literally kill you; that it’s so easy and human to want things that you can’t have. That it might be worth it to live briefly and die in the love of your life’s arms than to never leave a padded room, wasting your caretaker’s money and sanity until the day you wither away. It was like Madeline was experiencing the feeling of being overwhelmed; of not doing enough and of not being a part of the world, of kissing a boy and realizing there’s a difference between reading about kissing and kissing, watching a sunset over the ocean and reading about it. With the credit card she gets somehow chapters earlier, she secretly buys herself two roundtrip tickets to Hawaii and cons Olly into coming with her, leaving a suicide note for her mom and hoping she’ll understand.
Up to this point it sounds like Madeline is being kind of selfish right? Her brother and father were killed when she was a baby, having to bury Maddy would kill her mother, and after all the hell she’s been through for treatment and homeschooling, and making her life so comfortable??
But then the twist emerges. The twist that ruins the whole book for me and made me groan at every interaction Madeline had with her mom thereafter:
It just becomes a different story with a twist like that. I was expecting a Looking for Alaska situation where she does die and the story is told from Olly’s POV after the black page (the page she flatlines is completely black and like 3/4ths into the book) to make him seem more 3 dimensional than the perfect goofball with a splash of angst; although apparently Olly’s character was modeled after Nicola Yoon’s husband which I find very sweet. I too love a manic pixie dream boy who might write me a haiku or dress a bundt in a costume.
All in all I think it might have been more impactful if that decision of living life versus remaining safe was really left to Madeline in a way that wasn’t so “Happily Ever After” with the byline “what if Mother Gothel was mentally ill and had suffered a trauma?” I really disliked the mom at the end, and I resented that I disliked her since their relationship is so cute and seems so sincere. As with her relationship with Carla; we love to see positive female relationships. Again, I really wish the determination of the meaning of life was more up to Madeline in her dying moments or that it was a misdiagnosis. I hated resenting her *with* Madeline during those last few chapters. And we were left with Maddy meeting up with Olly in a New York bookstore and then sometime in the future whisking them off to a proper Hawaii vacation like they’re grown? Boggles the mind, but hey it’s cute ig.
If not for the ending I would have given it a 4/5, but the takeaway wasn’t as satisfying as I expected it to be imo. ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
OH also? I had a conversation with my mom how frustrating I found the twist but she admitted that Dr. Whittier’s POV doesn't seem unreasonable given what she’s been through; I guess there’s more than one way to see an ending like this and many ways to interpret a mother’s love and grief and fear. For me? It cheapened the great yearning to make it never Madeline’s choice
Everything, Everything is about a girl, Madeline Whittier who has the infamous bubble person disease or SCID in the medical world. Her nurses, mother, and visitors must be sterilized in a special way and limit the amount of touching prior to certain screenings. She’s been sick her whole life and her mother, a doctor, really only found out after running extensive tests on her when she was five months old when she kept getting sick. This was one month after a tragic accident that took the life of Madeline’s father and brother and although she was too young to remember them, the ghost of their presence lingers in her mind. From the settlement Madeline’s mother’s able to afford the works and sets them up comfortably in southern California. Next door in their secluded neighborhood mooves manic pixie dream boy Oliver “call me Olly” Bright and his family, Alt sister who smokes, weepy mom, and asshole drunk dad.
Olly and his sister Kara come over with a bundt cake and want to meet Madeline because Olly saw her watching from the window, but Mom tells them to go away. Ugh. In retrospect it's no wonder Maddy feels the way she feels at the end. Maddy and Olly hold up signs and exchange email handles, then begin to communicate with each other. Conversations of “No I’m not grounded” and “My favorite song is...” turn into “I’m sick” and “My family’s kind of broken but I’m making the most of it. They get close and the super cool Nurse Carla begins to sneak him in after decontaminating him in secret. Mom finds out and completely explodes when she gets hip, but by then Madeline has kissed the boy and experienced the fire that comes with being with him. She explores the ides of wanding more when desire could literally kill you; that it’s so easy and human to want things that you can’t have. That it might be worth it to live briefly and die in the love of your life’s arms than to never leave a padded room, wasting your caretaker’s money and sanity until the day you wither away. It was like Madeline was experiencing the feeling of being overwhelmed; of not doing enough and of not being a part of the world, of kissing a boy and realizing there’s a difference between reading about kissing and kissing, watching a sunset over the ocean and reading about it. With the credit card she gets somehow chapters earlier, she secretly buys herself two roundtrip tickets to Hawaii and cons Olly into coming with her, leaving a suicide note for her mom and hoping she’ll understand.
Up to this point it sounds like Madeline is being kind of selfish right? Her brother and father were killed when she was a baby, having to bury Maddy would kill her mother, and after all the hell she’s been through for treatment and homeschooling, and making her life so comfortable??
But then the twist emerges. The twist that ruins the whole book for me and made me groan at every interaction Madeline had with her mom thereafter:
Spoiler
Her mom fabricated the whole thing! As a baby she kept getting sick, but she just had an unusually weak immune system. Grief from loss of love and stress of raising a newborn made her mother get tests on her daughter that might point to SCID. None of these tests do, but AS A DOCTOR Dr. Whittier knows that SCID can present in different and often rare ways. The wording here was so vague and confusing that at first I didn’t even really know what was happening. Madeline has an episode in Hawaii, in bed next to Olly after the best cherry poppin ever, her heart stops, she’s taken to a Hospital in Hawaii and treated then brought back home and forbidden to see Olly. She breaks up with him and weeks later since she has limited internet access and I’m sure some other reason the hospital in Maui mails NOT e-mails her a packet of information that says “hey maybe you’re not sick and your mom’s just gaslighting you” The book proceeds, Madeline consults with doctors on her own or with her favorite nurse and takes things one day at a time, then plans a surprise to visit Olly, who had since then moved to New York.It just becomes a different story with a twist like that. I was expecting a Looking for Alaska situation where she does die and the story is told from Olly’s POV after the black page (the page she flatlines is completely black and like 3/4ths into the book) to make him seem more 3 dimensional than the perfect goofball with a splash of angst; although apparently Olly’s character was modeled after Nicola Yoon’s husband which I find very sweet. I too love a manic pixie dream boy who might write me a haiku or dress a bundt in a costume.
All in all I think it might have been more impactful if that decision of living life versus remaining safe was really left to Madeline in a way that wasn’t so “Happily Ever After” with the byline “what if Mother Gothel was mentally ill and had suffered a trauma?” I really disliked the mom at the end, and I resented that I disliked her since their relationship is so cute and seems so sincere. As with her relationship with Carla; we love to see positive female relationships. Again, I really wish the determination of the meaning of life was more up to Madeline in her dying moments or that it was a misdiagnosis. I hated resenting her *with* Madeline during those last few chapters. And we were left with Maddy meeting up with Olly in a New York bookstore and then sometime in the future whisking them off to a proper Hawaii vacation like they’re grown? Boggles the mind, but hey it’s cute ig.
If not for the ending I would have given it a 4/5, but the takeaway wasn’t as satisfying as I expected it to be imo. ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
OH also? I had a conversation with my mom how frustrating I found the twist but she admitted that Dr. Whittier’s POV doesn't seem unreasonable given what she’s been through; I guess there’s more than one way to see an ending like this and many ways to interpret a mother’s love and grief and fear. For me? It cheapened the great yearning to make it never Madeline’s choice