Switch by A.S. King

Switch is the newest novel from the incomparable A.S. King.  Like usual, Amy delivers an incredible novel that will make you think about the world we live in as you frantically turn the pages.  In this novel, King has us contemplating time and how we use that which we are given.  She makes us consider how we treat each other and how that might make a difference in the world around us.  And maybe most important, she helps us understand trauma and how we can heal from it.  I can't tell you how many times I had to set this book down and think about what I had just read.  This story is so beautifully an A.S. King book that I would have known she had written it without ever being told who the author was.  

In Switch, time has stopped.  The world continues to go on, but time no longer exists.  Kids in school have been tasked with finding a solution to this problem.  Truda Becker believes the problem lies entirely with how we treat each other and maybe even more so, how we treat ourselves.  And as her family deals with the aftermath of a destructive sibling, her life continues to turn (quite literally) out of control.  There is a switch inside Tru's house that nobody is allowed to touch.  In fact, her father has build a wooden box around it to keep it safe.  He then built a box around that box, and he continued to do the same thing over and over until the house was just a series of boxes, one inside of the other.  But as she works to heal her family, she is determined to find out what will happen when she flips that switch.  Just maybe, the world will be right-side-up once again. 

 

From Amazon: 

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.