Another Day by David Levithan

Every day is the same for Rhiannon. She has accepted her life, convinced herself that she deserves her distant, temperamental boyfriend, Justin, even established guidelines by which to live: Don’t be too needy. Avoid upsetting him. Never get your hopes up.

Until the morning everything changes. Justin seems to see her, to want to be with her for the first time, and they share a perfect day—a perfect day Justin doesn’t remember the next morning. Confused, depressed, and desperate for another day as great as that one, Rhiannon starts questioning everything. Then, one day, a stranger tells her that the Justin she spent that day with, the one who made her feel like a real person…wasn’t Justin at all.

In this enthralling companion to his New York Times bestseller Every Day, David Levithan tells Rhiannon’s side of the story as she seeks to discover the truth about love and how it can change you.

Goodreads description

I suspect that many authors, in addition to developing their stories from the point of the view of the protagonist, also explore their stories from the point of other major characters. I know I do. This allows the author to give psychological depth to all the main characters. What they don't do is write a companion novel telling the story from the other person's point of view. Unless you happen to be David Levithan. Is this self indulgent on the part of the author? Does it add enough to the reader's experience? The jury's out on that one, if you look at the reviews on Goodreads. I can't comment as I have not read Every Day - although it is on my Kindle. I am not sure I will read it now, which is not David Levithan's intention I am sure. 

The concept behind both books is that the character A is a being who inhabits the body of a different person a day. In Every Day the story is told from A's point of view, in Another Day from Rhiannon's. On the day A meets Rhiannon he is in the body of Justin and he falls for her. I say "he" but A can inhabit the bodies of girls as well, and indeed of transgender people. This creates a strong driver of the story, but it also raises issues about sexuality and identity, and love as opposed to physical attraction. There is also the philosophical question about how much A's day in a person's body/life should impact on that person's wider life. Fascinating stuff, and this is a novel that leaves you pondering bigger questions. As this is a book for the YA market (although this 50+ reader didn't feel that this inhibited her enjoyment) that is something to be particularly welcomed. 

The central character of Rhiannon is very well drawn. Her self esteem is not high and her relationship with the selfish and damaged Justin is lowering it. Encountering A in his various forms and falling for "him" allows Rhiannon to question her unhappy liaison's impact on her life. The philosophical questions in the book are therefore integral to the storyline.

Another Day is an interesting, thought-provoking and enjoyable book and I am grateful to the publishers for granting me a free review copy in return for a fair review.

A Floating Life by Tad Crawford

A nameless narrator awakens to the muddle of middle age, no longer certain who or what he is. He finds himself at a party talking to a woman he doesn't know who proves to be his wife. Soon separated but still living in the same apartment, he is threatened by a litigious dachshund and saddled with a stubborn case of erectile dysfunction in a world that seems held together by increasingly mercurial laws and elusive boundaries. His relationship deepens with an elderly Dutch model maker named Pecheur whose miniature boats are erratically offered for sale in a hard-to-find shop called The Floating World. Enlivened by Pecheur's dream to tame the destructive forces of nature, the narrator begins to find his bearings.

With quiet humor and wisdom, A Floating Life charts its course among images that surprise and disorient, such as a job interview in a steam room with a one-eyed, seven-foot-tall chef, a midnight intrusion of bears, and the narrator’s breast feeding of the baby he has birthed. 

From Amazon Description

I often read blogs, in which writers give advice to other writers. Some of the advice is good, some of it obvious and some of it suggests the writer has not read many books. One example of the latter sort of advice is “Don’t write about dreams.” Clearly that person has not read Lewis Carroll. And nor have s/he read Tad Crawford’s A Floating Life.

Like Alice in Wonderland the whole of Crawford’s book has a dreamlike quality. There are dreams in the book, but which sections are the central character’s dreams and which not is not always clear. As a bear says at one point “I spent a lot of time imagining who the dreams might belong to. Finally, I thought of you.”

Yes I did say “bear”. During the course of the book the narrator meets with a family of bears who live under Central Park, a litigious dachsund, Numun, an estate agent who offers him a golden cage in a building which is being built downwards, a World War II Japanese soldier and a modern Charon and Cerberus (and more as the Amazon description makes clear). As magic realism goes this is definitely on the magical/surrealist side. The dreams are edgy and often disturbing. There were times when I was reminded of the short stories of Karen Heuler.

The book does have realist elements. The narrator seems to be living a normal life working in marketing with a wife who is fed up with the fact that he hasn’t matured and who has decided to leave him. But even these elements are dealt with in a dreamlike way – he has a conversation with his wife at a party without recognizing her or apparently she him. The most realistic element is perhaps Pecheur and his model shop A Floating Life. The fantastic maritime scenes Pecheur displays are explained as computer programmed, engineered, modelled, although I doubt such programming is possible in real life. But Pecheur's displays have significance for the dreams and magic that follow.

I enjoyed this unusual book. It is strewn with symbolism - Jung would have had a field day. On writing this review I realise that I really ought to read it again to see what more I can find.