Switch

A.S. King

May 2021 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

A surreal and timely novel about the effects of isolation and what it means to be connected to the world from the Printz Award-winning author of Dig.

Time has stopped. It's been June 23, 2020 for nearly a year as far as anyone can tell. Frantic adults demand teenagers focus on finding practical solutions to the worldwide crisis. Not everyone is on board though. Javelin-throwing prodigy Truda Becker is pretty sure her "Solution Time" class won't solve the world's problems, but she does have a few ideas what might. Truda lives in a house with a switch that no one ever touches, a switch her father protects every day by nailing it into hundreds of progressively larger boxes. But Truda's got a crow bar, and one way or another, she's going to see what happens when she flips the switch.

Ratings and reviews

This is my first book by this author and it won't be my last. I flew through this book with its unique format and lyrical text punctuated with electrical switch symbols instead of conventional punctuation. Even the cover is full of symbolism. I found this book to be relative to what is happening/has happened in the world with the pandemic--not stopping time as in this book, but stopping life the way I've known it all along. This book is thought-provoking and analyzes human priorities after a major change or switch in the characters' lives. I enjoyed Truda's voice as the narrator and connected to her immediately. Although it took me a few pages in to grasp the world-building, I enjoyed getting to know how the world was reacting and dealing with the stoppage of time. I also enjoyed the family drama, especially Truda's parents' relationship as a married couple working through their own issues as well as rebuilding trust with two of their three children. I had hoped to get to know more about the oldest daughter, but am left to decide on my own if she was truly devious or if she was even real or just a symbol of the family's destruction. I also enjoyed the close friendships Truda had at school and the support each gave to one another. I found myself cheering for them as the worked together on their time projects. I'm very happy I gave this book a chance as it stretched my mind and pulled me out of

1.5 stars I am not even sure what this book was about. The publisher's summary makes it sound interesting but in reality, the book isn’t about much. This whole book is just about flipping a switch in a house that is covered and separated by different boxes. Not sure why there are so many different boxes in their house because not all of them are protecting this switch. I am going to start with the one thing I did 'like' in this book. Probably the only thing that held my attention in this story was the mystery surrounding the sister of the main girl and her brother. There is a battle they fight to try and separate themselves from the manipulation, lies, and abuse this sister has caused. She has told so many lies and for me, this added a nice suspenseful mysterious character to the story who you are trying to figure out. She is only briefly mentioned in the beginning but then we learn more little by little as it is revealed. This was done really well to help build some backstory to the characters and to add some needed conflict and feeling into the book. But now the things that I personally didn't enjoy in this book. It didn’t feel like a finished book. While reading it, it felt like a rough draft with only half a thought not fully formed and executed. This had a lot to do with how the book was written, which I have never seen before. Instead of writing things in complete sentences the book was written abbreviated with backslashes between each thought. A lot of the instances this was used was to resay the same thing in many different ways. Kind of how you would writing a book trying to decide which word or phrase to use. But instead of picking one this book has them all. Having everything abbreviated moved the story along so it felt like it was moving very fast from topic to topic. I would like this face-paced normally but sadly this book was faced past into more stuff that didn’t matter. At the beginning of the book, I was very lost with what was happening. Things were not clearly explained. The main reason it was so hard to understand was that what was happening made no sense at all. It took a while to wrap my head around what was happening. Then halfway through when something else happened I would go through this process all over again to try and figure the insanity of what was happening, and that isn’t good insanity. When I normally use that word it is in a good way by saying it was entertaining but this book was just plain weird. I really do not get the point of this book. This is very disappointing because the plot sounded interesting but how it was executed was very poor in my opinion. It was also very unrealistic. Yes, I know time-stopping is unrealistic but I mean with how the characters acted. Like the main girl could stop time, which randomly appeared with no explanation. It felt very thrown in and random. We have already read like half the book and then suddenly she can make everyone pause. The first time she does it, it is like she has already done it a million times. She doesn’t question it and then just continues to randomly do it with no explanation. Then when she would do things while everyone else was paused, when they came back to and had their things missing, nothing happened. They acted like it was all completely normal. This could have been used to further the story and develop some suspense and tension but nope, they again just accepted it without anything further. Then my main problem was the time-stopping part. This was also something that made no sense to me. Like this sounds like a very cool sci-fi/dystopian plot idea but how it was done in this book, took this idea and made it horrible. To be honest it was made so that the only real thing was that the clocks stopped ticking and technically it was June 23, 2020, but everything else was the same. The sun still rose and set, the earth still rotated on its axis changing the seasons. So with this new clock that was designed, I don’t understand how time stopped. Nothing was different then if time hadn’t stopped.

Well, this book turned my brain inside out and upside down trying to get my head around it. Good thing it was not a really long book, though it would have been nice if the author explained more about the kids with special abilities and whether it had anything to do with the way time stopped. Tru, being one of those kids that had a super powerful javelin throw (world record throwing in fact), is the main character and though it took a bit to get used to it, I really got into her narrative with her broken family and how it related to the boxes her father built and the bombs left by her terrible sister. This book did a good job of physically showing a broken family and how to fix it, with the tilting house and boxes and how Tru tried to fix it with the dismantling of the boxes. The psychology parts were kind of interesting too, like the emotions clock. It was a twisty book and not usually what I read but I liked it.

About the author

A.S. King is the award-winning author of many acclaimed books for young readers. Her novel Dig won the 2020 Michael L. Printz Award, and Ask The Passengers won the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The New York Times called her "one of the best YA writers working today." King lives with her family in Pennsylvania, where she returned after living on a farm and teaching adult literacy in Ireland for more than a decade. www.as-king.com