Review 217: Switch

Switch by A.S. King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



The book starts out difficult to read. The text is unusual, jarring with the slash marks. The nature of the story is unusual, time has stopped and Tru's house has plywood boxes, covering the switch. Her father built boxes around boxes, hers is box#7 with a Tru sized hole in it, her brother’s #11. It’s odd.
After a little while the story starts to cohere, the flow finds itself, and I sank into the story.

What we have is a misfunctioning family, it’s torn apart. The older sister was a pathological liar, of extreme. Her mother left, the father lost his job. She the sister is now gone, still calls and tells more lies. The house shifts and these aspects in the story feel like metaphors for what is going on with the family, or society. The metaphors are abundant in the book.

One could look at the stopped time as a correlation to the pandemic, or perhaps it is more closely related to the family.

It’s a wild ride of a book, and I have a feeling teen readers will connect with the book. It approaches difficult subjects and deals with them, but not in a straight-forward manner.


Thanks to Dutton Books for Young Readers and NetGalley for an uncorrected electronic advance review copy of this book.