Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon
Hi, I am Sarah. I am fourteen years old and an avid reader; it is one of my favorite things to do. Inspired by authors’ creations of magnificent places and surprising havens built by simple letters, I aspire to be an author and, meanwhile, nurture the love to write.
Madeline has read more books that you. It doesn’t matter how many you’ve read. She’s read more. Heaven knows she’s had the time.
Maddy has SCIT, the bubble-baby syndrome, a disease as rare as it is famous. Basically, she is allergic to anything and everything. Anything – the chemicals in a cleaner, the spice in her soup, the dust in the closet – anything could trigger a deadly attack. And so she never leaves the house, which is equipped with state-of-the-art air filters and purifiers and sealed windows so nothing dangerous ever enters.
She hasn’t left her house in seventeen years.
She will never feel the grass under her feet and the wind in her hair, the summer sun on her cheek. She will never meet anyone or touch anyone or kiss anyone – she never has and never will.
Then Olly moves in next door. Olly becomes an obsession, and to Maddy the enigma, a very foreign and exciting thing. Because Maddy knows that you can’t read the future or what it has to bring, but you can predict some things. For example, Maddy is almost positively going to fall in love with Olly. It’s absolutely, positively going to be a big blow-up-in-your-face disaster.
But the longer Maddy lives safe and sound and isolated, the more she realizes how much she’s willing to risk. After seventeen years with nobody but her mother and caretaker for company, Olly – that intrepid and unpredictable and exciting boy next door – is the trigger that starts a chain of audacious and risky new adventures.
Nicola Yoon weaves a poignant and heartbreaking and beautifully structured story about young love, and what you’re willing to risk to experience it.
