SWITCH

Printz Award winner King returns with another surrealist masterpiece.

On June 23, 2020, the world became caught in “a fold in time and space.” For the past nine months, the United States has enacted Solution Time and been using N3WCLOCK to keep some semblance of normality. High school javelin star Truda Becker isn’t satisfied with these patched-together efforts, though, and she is determined to use psychology to find the “Real Solution.” While she puzzles over the irregularities of time and their grander meaning, Truda is also weighed down by irregularities in her home life. Her father, an immigrant from an unspecified country, spends his days obsessively building and rebuilding room-sized plywood boxes, making a disorienting warren of their family home. Her “clairvoyant” mother comes and goes, her brother is acting jumpy and suspicious, and the shadow of Truda’s abusive sister casts a pall over them all. Truda is determined: “By the end of the month, I will figure out how to make people give a shit about other people. I still have no idea how I’ll do this because I live in a house where emergencies are cubed like snack cheese and giving an actual shit has been put on hold.” Intentionally perplexing, the book carefully doles out reveals as it steadily weaves together seemingly disparate threads with precision. This otherwise stellar title unfortunately is marred by the repeated use of deaf to describe emotional evasion and dishonesty. Main characters read as White by default.

Timely and timeless.