Grades 9 and up
225 pages
For Tru, her town, and the rest of the world, time has frozen on June 23, 2020. Although she has track and field to help distract her, life is tilted and bizarre without the consistency of time. Meanwhile, Tru’s father is feverishly guarding a mysterious switch in their house that no one is allowed to touch. His continuous work of building more and more layers of plywood boxes around the switch leaves their home a labyrinth of ever thickening and twisting tunnels. At the same time, the toxicity and darkness of their family’s secrets cannot be covered up or willed away by odd habits and good intentions.
Tru is convinced that the key to fixing time is to get people to care about one another. Together, her and a few of her classmates study psychology in an attempt to unlock human empathy, and find out what it means to live and move when time stands still. Â
This book explores what it feels like to find agency in a world where seemingly everything is out of one’s control. Through hauntingly unconventional prose, this eccentric dystopia is driven by a protagonist who is more than willing to bend the perception of reality to display the fullness of her slowly unravelling mental health. Switch is for those with a willingness to lean in to an ever shifting landscape and relinquish the need to distinguish what is real and what isn’t. This story will help one process what it was like to survive 2020, and how one can find a way, despite it all.
Check out our other Teen Picks of the Month:Â
Every month the SCCLD Teen Librarians choose one book as a great read from the library's Teen collection. This is the list of the latest picks of the month.
