Switch by A. S. King ISBN: 9780525555537
Published by Penguin on May 10, 2022
Genres: Contemporary, Young Adult
Pages: 240
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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.
Typical of A.S. King novels, this one gripped me from the start. It’s surreal (magical realism) which I generally find fascinating, but also Tru’s voice is the most earnest, authentic, and wise of the entire cast (including adults)- a refreshing change. Overall, I found it engaging even in its weirdness, and poetic.
Part of why this resonated with me is the broad pandemic parallels. It was published in 2021, and I’m not sure if King was writing like the wind for a year to get this to the world, or if this predated COVID-19. The premise is different (in the book, all time has stopped in June 2020) but people are handling a worldwide crisis by ignoring it/finding artificial ways to replace the thing they’re lost, studying it/to replace it with something new or find out why it froze in the first place, and still being jerks to each other. And the majority of people are acting as if nothing monumental happened, trying to “get back to normal”, and so on.
Tru draws on psychology (which makes sense, as time is an artificial human construct) but which blew my mind and required several long pauses of thought. I related to her in that, like Tru, it took the pandemic for me to actually acknowledge and fully feel my feelings (the option of avoidance and dissociation was taken from me). That’s mostly where the parallel ended, but King does a lovely job of drawing you in and investing you in the book. So much of it is subtle, around the meaning of words (and relies on metaphor), from the fact that “sister” is never named to the slash used in nearly every paragraph to denote an either/or selection, which to me underscored the possibility for things to be always both options until the reader/receive makes their own interpretation in a Schrödinger’s cat sort of situation.
The two primary themes are latent potential in every person (embodied by Tru) and the power of language to shape everything (embodied by her family and her situation). The first sounds trite, and to me it played backup to the second.
If this book had a moral, it would be: Once you break free from the limitations of language that others have placed on you, you can truly see the potential in the world and choose what you do- but if you don’t make your choices with compassion for others and yourself, you’ll cause damage and that will limit you again.
Be aware there’s past instances of abuse/violence, harm to animals, and implied pedophilia. It’s not described in detail, and it serves a visceral purpose, but it may be upsetting.
This book was too smart for me, frankly. Like- I liked it, and I appreciated it, but I didn't "get" it. I am very glad that you did 😂 And I extra appreciate your review, because it like, made it make some sense bwhaha.
Heh, yay! Glad I could help. 😉