What We’re Reading

Are we There yet? | David Levithan

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David and Elijah Silver are 10 years apart, and while they were thick as thieves when Elijah was young, and Danny would wake the house every night to make sure the baby was ok, once Danny hit his teens, Elijah was shut out. Being so young, he didn’t understand, but he did learn to deal. Danny shut himself into his world, Elijah got lost in another.

One morning each brother receives a call from their mother explaining about Italy. She and their father were going to go, but his leg is acting up. The trip is entirely pre-paid, non-refundable. She wants her sons to go. And while each smells a ruse, each agrees to go.

The trip gets off to a rocky start. Try as they might (or might not) the brothers don’t know how to relate. Danny thinks Elijah is lazy, and wonders how he’ll survive in the real world, Elijah thinks Danny is too caught up in work and seriousness, and worries that he’ll never really live. Danny has strict plans on what he wants to do and when and how, whereas Elijah is content to wander and wonder and let the trip happen to him.

It’s on one such outing that he meets Julia, who appears from nowhere, and promises she’ll see him soon. Though he doesn’t know how that could be, he believes her anyway, and anxiously spends the end of his time in Venice searching for her. And on a balcony, he does indeed find her, much to his delight. Even more delightful: she’s also going to Rome.

Elijah spends most of the trip between asleep. Danny’s driving strikes him as restless, and he figures if he can’t see, he can’t be scared. But when Danny wakes him while they’re driving through a field of sunflowers, he feels a moment of sincere appreciation, knowing he could have slept right through and missed a wondrous thing.

Once in Rome, Elijah is impatient to find Julia, and so Danny says they should go find her and ask her to dinner. I’m sure you can see the dilemma. But dinner goes well. When Elijah befriends a neihboring table, Julia and Danny entertain one another. When Elijah returns his attention, Julia returns hers, and jealousy is kept at bay. When dinner ends, Elijah and Julia head off on their own, and Danny is left feeling a perpetual third wheel. Wherever he goes, he seems to be intruding, or inivisible.

Through the twists and turns of life containing Julia, both brothers come to certain relizations. Given plenty of time to himself, Danny starts to reevaluate, and reaches out to old friends. Elijah tries to balance his life back home with life as it is in Italy, unsure how to make them mesh. In the end, the separate ordeals give them a new kind of understanding of one another. And while the trip didn’t go down as smoothly as the parents might have ideally hoped, it did in the end have the desired effect. Danny and Elijah will likely never again be thick as theives, but they’re no longer worlds apart either. Or if they are, the world is certainly manageable, where it was once a distance impossible to breach.

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