Scan barcode
artemishi's review
challenging
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
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.
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.
Content Warnings
Minor: Emotional abuse, Vomit, Physical abuse, Pedophilia, and Animal cruelty
betweentheshelves's review
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
I'll just say, this was out there, even for A.S. King. Usually her books border on surrealism, but this one felt like it just went a little too far. Maybe I read it too fast? However, there are elements in this book that do connect to everything that happened in the last year. Maybe I just wanted a little more clarity by the end.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Emotional abuse, Animal cruelty, and Mental illness
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Body shaming, and Cursing
Minor: Child abuse, Pedophilia, and Physical abuse
colleensreadingadventures's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
I think my brain broke reading this! 🤣🤣
Honestly I don’t think I’m smart enough or even have a good enough imagination to wholly appreciate the story. But the writing is excellent and certainly creative.
Switch is an extremely unique book. It involves some magical realism mixed with a story about a family in crisis. “Real” time has stopped for the world and the world is looking for answers. Tru is one of the students tasked with helping through a class called Solution Time. She and her classmates are each tasked with coming up with ideas on how to keep going with numerical time standing still.
In Tru’s home she notices there is a switch in her house, she doesn’t know what it is for, but she does know that her dad keeps building boxes around it to stop anyone from touching it. And every time she takes some of the boxes down her father just puts more up.
Tru’s life is a bit of a mess. Her mom is not living at home, her dad quit his job and continues to build all these boxes. Her brother is wound up so tight and her sister is some sort of sociopath. Tru’s only thing that’s all her own is her new found ability in throwing the javelin. Which she can throw farther than anyone has ever thrown before.
Can Tru get her family back on track, figure out how solve the worlds current crisis and get all the boxes taken down in her home? Only time will tell!
While for me Switch was a little on the bizarre side I really enjoyed Tru’s story. The story was never boring. The cast of characters were interesting, especially Tru’s family members. The sister was definitely a scary character and I would have had her committed at a young age if I were her parent. That or put locks on the outside of her door..lol.
I was fully invested in the outcome, waiting to see if Tru could fix her broken family, if she could ever get to the switch, and she would fix time.
Kudos A.S. King for such a distinctly refreshing novel. And a big thanks to Penguin Teen allowing me to review the ARC.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Emotional abuse, and Mental illness
Minor: Pedophilia, Sexual assault, and Child abuse
intergalacticintrovert's review
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
“To understand anything is to understand energy.”
Switch gets an automatic five stars from me because it incorporated so many of my own ideas and ways of thinking that it was almost like reading my internal monologue. An extremely surreal experience that I hope everyone can find through a book at some point.
The writing style is unlike anything I’ve read before, including A. S. King’s other eccentric works. There are lots of slashes that separate different-but-related ideas mid sentence, like a switch. This definitely makes the book harder to read, but I personally enjoyed it because it makes the prose more like poetry / a puzzle / an actual train of thought :)
The first part is super preachy but this tapers off towards the middle.
The plot isn’t cohesive, and the story feels very “slice of life” to me. But, time has literally stopped, so maybe that’s the point…
On that note, I think the ending is very predictable. Considering all the strange and fantastical elements that happen in the lead-up, I was a little underwhelmed.
I love that Tru exposes the cracks in high school and the education system. I think lots of teens will find this relatable. I certainly did!
Finally, you’ve got to stretch your mind to follow this story. If you haven’t read anything by A. S. King before (I’d recommend starting with Dig or Still Life with Tornado|28588459|Still Life with Tornado), nothing can really prepare you for this. But, again, maybe that’s the point.
Switch gets an automatic five stars from me because it incorporated so many of my own ideas and ways of thinking that it was almost like reading my internal monologue. An extremely surreal experience that I hope everyone can find through a book at some point.
The writing style is unlike anything I’ve read before, including A. S. King’s other eccentric works. There are lots of slashes that separate different-but-related ideas mid sentence, like a switch. This definitely makes the book harder to read, but I personally enjoyed it because it makes the prose more like poetry / a puzzle / an actual train of thought :)
The first part is super preachy but this tapers off towards the middle.
The plot isn’t cohesive, and the story feels very “slice of life” to me. But, time has literally stopped, so maybe that’s the point…
On that note, I think the ending is very predictable. Considering all the strange and fantastical elements that happen in the lead-up, I was a little underwhelmed.
I love that Tru exposes the cracks in high school and the education system. I think lots of teens will find this relatable. I certainly did!
Finally, you’ve got to stretch your mind to follow this story. If you haven’t read anything by A. S. King before (I’d recommend starting with Dig or Still Life with Tornado|28588459|Still Life with Tornado), nothing can really prepare you for this. But, again, maybe that’s the point.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Emotional abuse
Moderate: Sexual assault and Pedophilia
Minor: Suicide and Animal cruelty
thebookmouse's review
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.25
For the longest time A.S. King has been the author I have been most anticipated to read from. I have never read a book written by her, until now, but I have every single one on my TBR. I don't know why I chose to read this one first, but I think part of it was that it is her most recent and she has written so many it's intimidating on knowing where to start.
Switch is the story of Tru, a young girl living with her father and brother in a house with a switch. No-one knows what it does, just that it shouldn't be touched. Inside her house, her father keeps building bigger and bigger boxes around this switch to keep it protected, so that their house has become a maze, and Tru lives in box number 7. Outside of this the world is stuck in a fold in time, so that it has been the same day, year, minute since it stopped. Artificial time is now being marked on a website someone created called N3WCLOCK.com.
Weird right? Yes. This much I understood, but the story is so abstract it was hard to make sense of what was going on. It was written in a very strange way that didn't quite feel like a novel, but also didn't feel like poetry - something in between. It made me feel very disconnected from the story, I couldn't gain any insight, or develop any feelings about these characters because everything was so choppy.
I like the idea's she was trying to convey about time, about how everyone is so determined to meet deadlines and feeling so much pressure on time that they forget to live and enjoy themselves, but outside of this, I didn't love it.
I will still work through my A. S. King tbr and hopefully will adore some (if not all) of the others. This one just did not do it for me.
Thank you to A.S. King, the publishers and NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book in exchange of an honest review.
Switch is the story of Tru, a young girl living with her father and brother in a house with a switch. No-one knows what it does, just that it shouldn't be touched. Inside her house, her father keeps building bigger and bigger boxes around this switch to keep it protected, so that their house has become a maze, and Tru lives in box number 7. Outside of this the world is stuck in a fold in time, so that it has been the same day, year, minute since it stopped. Artificial time is now being marked on a website someone created called N3WCLOCK.com.
Weird right? Yes. This much I understood, but the story is so abstract it was hard to make sense of what was going on. It was written in a very strange way that didn't quite feel like a novel, but also didn't feel like poetry - something in between. It made me feel very disconnected from the story, I couldn't gain any insight, or develop any feelings about these characters because everything was so choppy.
I like the idea's she was trying to convey about time, about how everyone is so determined to meet deadlines and feeling so much pressure on time that they forget to live and enjoy themselves, but outside of this, I didn't love it.
I will still work through my A. S. King tbr and hopefully will adore some (if not all) of the others. This one just did not do it for me.
Thank you to A.S. King, the publishers and NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book in exchange of an honest review.
Content Warnings
Minor: Child abuse and Pedophilia
booksandbigideas's review
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Gonna hold this close to my heart as someone who has my own slow-down, time-stop moment and is a psychology nerd.
I highly suggest watching any of the book tour events if they’ve been posted (some have)...such a healing experience.
I highly suggest watching any of the book tour events if they’ve been posted (some have)...such a healing experience.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Emotional abuse, Mental illness, and Physical abuse
Minor: Pedophilia
mxrumphius's review
challenging
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Emotional abuse, Domestic abuse, and Toxic relationship
Minor: Suicide attempt, Suicidal thoughts, Pedophilia, and Mental illness
More...