Spoilers: Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon

  Bookish Reviews

Everything, Everything

by Nicola Yoon

“Spoiler alert: love is worth everything. Everything.”

If you were stuck in your house all your life, would you go crazy, or make the best of it?

Madeline Whittier was diagnosed with a rare immune disorder called SCID when she was a baby. 

Spoiler: she’s not really sick. 

She keeps herself busy by taking online classes, including an architecture class that allows her to build models, using social media, interacting with a support group her mom made her join, reading, and writing book reviews (that’s where I got the idea for this.)

Maddy’s day is simple; wake up, greet the nurse Carla, do her vitals, eat, do homework, eat, then keep entertained. For one, Maddy loves her books. They arrive to her vacuum sealed, decontaminated, and ready to be opened. The first thing she does is write her name and a list of rewards if found.

Another thing Maddy enjoys to keep herself busy is Fonetic Scrabble with her mom. It is how it sounds (no pun intended); scrabble, but you spell the words how they sound.

She likes her routine, the familiarity of it. Until Olly moves in next door with his abusive father, scared mother, and younger sister. Maddy cannot resist the boy-next-door. He makes her laugh, feel pretty, and make her want to risk her life for him. Typical boy, right?

After falling head-over-heels in love, Maddy buys two plane tickets to Hawaii. She lies to Olly saying she has these new pills, and leaves a note for her mom. Next thing, she and Olly are in Hawaii, cliff-diving, snorkeling, and dying. Typical holiday. Maddy falls horrendously ill two days into their trip, causing her to be hospitalised. Her heart stopped. Then started again.

Fast forward to home again: her mother is worried sick, Carla is back (oh yeah forgot to mention; her mom fired Carla), Maddy breaks up with Olly, who moves back to New York a week later without his father.

All’s well, until Maddy receives a phone call from her nurse in Hawaii who says she never had SCID. After scavenging her mother’s office and finding no reports of SCID, she runs out of the house and goes to see a SCID expert. It’s true: she was never sick. Turns out, after her father and brother were killed in a car accident, Mrs. Whittier had some sort of breakdown. In order to keep her daughter safe from all worldly dangers, she convinced both of them that Maddy was sick.

With this new information, she jets off to New York to surprise Olly in an old bookshop. 

Spoiler: he’s very pleased and they are very cute.

Opinion time: I finished this book in a day. The story was a unique, captivating experience. I was smiling for most of it, then I was pissed off at her mom. It actually angered me that Maddy wasn’t more angry. If I were her, I would have completely shut out the mom and punched a wall.

Anyway.

This book is fantastic. A love-story like no other.

Rating: Rapunzel/100. What? Maddy reminds me of Rapunzel; I don’t care if that’s not a legitimate bookish story character.

Signing off,

Ashley Gishen