Yoon, N. (2015). Everything, Everything.New York: Random House.

Madeline is a girl with SCID, a disease that makes her allergic to almost everything around her.  She stays cocooned in her house with her doctor mom and full-time nurse.  She lives as normal as possible but doesn’t have any personal contact with anyone but her mom and nurse. If anyone does come to the house they have to go through a long process of a physical and a vacuumed sealed room.  Olly and his family move next door and Madeline is captivated by him.  They finally start communicating over email and instant messenger.  Olly calls her Maddy, he is nothing like she has experienced before.  She can’t share her secret, she does’t want him to feel sorry for him. She can tell as she watches his family from her window that his dad is abusive.  The nurse lets Olly start to visit and they can’t help but fall in love with each other. Her illness keeps her from doing what she wants to do, she is tired of not living but her mother would never understand.  Olly and his dad are in a fight on their porch and before she knows it, she runs outside to stop them.  Everyone is shocked she is out of the house and her mom finds out about Olly.  Her nurse, who is her friend is fired. Finally, Maddy decides she is going to risk her health and go on a trip.  She talks Olly to going with her, he is reluctant but she convinces him.  Will the trip permanently  hurt her?  She is willing to risk her health for the love she has for Olly.  Through a twist, Maddy discovers the truth about her illness.  Her life will never be the same.

Everything, Everything has been on the NY best seller list for 53 weeks, it debut  the first week the book was released.  Currently Yoon has two books on the New York Best Seller List, her book The Sun is also a Star has been on the list for 33 weeks.  Everything, Everything has been made into a movie and was released in May 2017. It has already made 3 times as much as the movie’s budget.  Nicola Yoon wrote a piece about diversity and been the importance of books with diversity been non-issue books.  She said while it is important to have book that are issue oriented, readers need to see people of color and various orientation in everyday situations.  She said she partly wrote Everything, Everything so that her daughter could see herself on the page.  Ordinary Diversity in Fiction  by Yoon.

Classroom ideas include having a dialogue about the issues that Yoon brings up, diversity being a part of books without being part of the struggle.   You can teach plot twist and character development with this book.  I believe the reader is genuinely surprised with the twist in the story.  Literary elements can be taught with this too, is the ending is believable or more of a  Deus Ex Machina. Topics covered in the book are romance, interracial relationship, friendship and mistrust.