8.4 /10 1 Votes
4.3/5 Barnes & Noble | 4.1/5 Goodreads Originally published 1 September 2015 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Adaptations Everything, Everything (2017) Nominations Goodreads Choice Awards Best Young Adult Fiction Friendship books Beautiful Broken Things, Dumplin', Extraordinary Means, Tell Me Three Things, The Unexpected Everything | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Everything, Everything is a young adult novel by American author Nicola Yoon, published in 2015. It is Nicola's first novel. The novel centers on 18-year-old Madeline Whittier, who has severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), also known as “bubble baby disease". Due to her condition, Madeline is stuck inside her house in Los Angeles where she lives with her mother, a physician who takes care of her.
Contents
Plot
The story follows 18-year-old Madeline Whittier who suffers from severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) and therefore cannot leave her house, or interact with anything that hasn't been "sanitized." Her world consists of her mother, her nurse Carla, and the books she immerses herself in, as her father and brother died a long time ago. A family moves in next door and Madeline watches them from the window. She befriends Olly, the son of the family and the two begin to message each other online. She also notices that Olly's father is mean and abusive, and that his sister has a smoking problem. One day, Carla sneaks Olly into Maddie's house, and the two meet face to face for the first time. They begin meeting in Maddie's house regularly, and at one point Maddy even goes outside for a few seconds. When her mother discovers Maddy has been secretly meeting someone, she fires Carla and bans Maddy from ever seeing Olly again, but they continue secretly texting. Olly and Maddy decide to go to Hawaii together, which is also the last place Maddy believes she had a "normal family." However, Olly only agrees to go after Maddy lies and tells him that she's on a new medicine that will keep her from getting sick. The two go to Hawaii, and have sex in the hotel room. The next day, Maddy has to be taken to a hospital because she begins to feel extremely sick. Olly calls her mother, and she comes to Hawaii and takes Maddy home. A few weeks later, Maddy gets a letter from the doctor who treated her in Hawaii after she got sick, and in the note the doctor says that Maddy does not have SCID, and she got sick because she had spent her whole life inside and has never formed a natural immunity. Maddy, angry and panicked, searches her mothers medical files, but she doesn't find the test results or doctors notes she was looking for that would confirm she had SCID. Instead she finds some notes her mother wrote and a few articles about SCID from the internet. she confronts her mom, and her mom breaks down and admits she doesn't have SCID. Maddy tells Carla, and Carla says she always suspected that. A few days later Maddy sees Olly, his sister, and his mom move all of their belongings into a moving van while their dad is at work, escaping his tyranny. Maddy and Olly continue to email and text. Maddie's mom, after therapy, reveals that right after Maddy's dad (a police officer) and her brother died, Maddy got very sick, and her mom, not wanting to lose her, decide she had SCID, and needed to be kept away from the world. In the end Maddy and Olly happily reunite.
Reception
A reviewer for The Guardian wrote about the book "The way the author describes Madeline's world using such beautiful imagery makes the reader appreciate the little things in life".
Film adaptation
The novel is being adapted into a feature film. In July 2016 it was announced that Amandla Stenberg would lead as Madeline Whittier and Nick Robinson would play opposite Stenberg as Olly. Stella Meghie is slated to direct the film. J. Mills Goodloe wrote the script.