Imagine having never left your house for as long as you can remember. This is the reality for Madeline in Nicola Yoon’s book Everything, Everything. Madeline has a very rare disease where essentially she is allergic to the world. Because anything could cause her to have an allergic reaction, she never goes outside. Madeline is okay with this situation because it is all that she has ever known. But when a new boy, Olly, moves in next door, Maddy begins to realize what she has been missing out on. And as she gets to know Olly better, she begins to long for a more “normal” life. Eventually, she decides that she can’t keep wasting her life, so she and Olly take a trip to Hawaii, her first time out of the house in nearly 17 years. She thoroughly enjoys the trip and getting to spend time with Olly. Even though she wasn’t sure if she was going to physically live for the whole trip, she decided that it was worth dying to get to actually live a little bit instead of staying in her house for the rest of her life. This book really got me thinking about all of the things that I take for granted. Even really simple things that I do every day, Madeline couldn’t do. For example, I go outside multiple times every day, even if it’s just walking from my house to the car, or from the car to school. But Madeline never got to experience things like this. The other thing that this book really reminded me of, is that even though I try really hard to treat people who are different than me the same, it can be really hard to always do this. For instance, while I try not to think about people differently based on the color of their skin, racism has been in my blood since before I was born, simply because of the society that I live in. This really became clear to me when I first picked up this book. I wasn’t sure if it would work for this assignment because I thought that it was about a white girl who was about the same age as me. But once I started reading and found out that she was a part black, part Asian girl, I really started to question myself. I knew nothing about the ethnicity of Madeline, I had simply assumed that she was white. This really made me start thinking about what other things I assume about people without any facts to back them up. One thing that Madeline talks about a lot is living your life, even if for her, it meant dying. This was something that really went to my heart, and I have been trying to think more about it recently. Sometimes when I’m trying to make a difficult decision, it’s helpful for me to remember that I need to be living my life, even if it seems like there might be “more important” things to do. They probably won’t matter in the future, and I’ll be happy that I have lived a little! Also, once Maddy had made the decision to live her life fully, that in itself helped her feel better. Sometimes just deciding to do something can help you feel better, which is something that I have felt in my heart before, and will do so more often after reading this book. “Ever since Olly came into my life there’ve been two Maddy’s: the one who lives through books and doesn’t want to die, and the one who lives and suspects that death will be a small price to pay for it... the second Maddy knows that this pale half life is not really living” (Yoon 167). Sylvia S.
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AuthorSTenth grade students at Decorah High School share how they're reading outside of their own experiences and how it has changed them. Categories
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November 2022
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