In the latest edition of “Travis doesn’t quite get it,” we have Switch by A.S. King. I kept waiting for some sort of lightbulb moment, but nothing ever flicked that switch (couldn’t resist). Switch tells the story of a Tru Beck, a teenage girl from my home state of Pennsylvania, for whom time has ceased to exist. In her world, it’s randomly gone away, but things are still expected to go on just the same. Meanwhile, at home, she lives in what sounds like the house equivalent of those rolling ball mazes, rather than your usual home with normal rooms. Her father’s constantly building and remodeling the house, and her mother has long since left.
Conceptually, I was there for all of this. But the longer it went, and the more thought I put into it, the less I was. First of all, silly me couldn’t help think about how the central conceit was a bit outlandish. Time didn’t stop. It was still moving forward. Just their clocks stopped working, I guess? So they had to make other methods of telling the time that, somehow, did work? That just sounds like an inconvenience more than anything.
Then there’s Tru’s house; although at first I wanted to know more about why it was the way it was, I never felt like it was suitably explained. What explanations we do get towards the end, for me, don’t serve to sell me on any of the magical realism of the book. Instead, they only served to underline how silly I found them all to be. “That’s what this was all about?” I found myself asking.
Lastly, the way the book was written grated on me. It felt like it was going for something between poetry and prose, never sure what it wanted to be. Whenever it dipped into the “prose” category for a while, it was fine, but when it went poetic again for an extended period of time, I just found myself getting annoyed because I felt it didn’t really work. Not that mixing the two was a bad idea necessarily, but that it was done poorly.
So, overall, the book felt a little half-baked to me and lacked any hook to pull me in. Aside from the “time” and house silliness, and Tru learning she can randomly throw a javelin further than anybody in human history, the story felt slight. It felt, to me, like a very padded short story. It’s not that there’s nothing of interest there, it’s that it feels stretched thin. Like A.S. King devoted too much time and inadvertently gave so much of an air of importance to something that didn’t need it.