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Switched begins with a flashback. Our narrator, a seventeen-year-old named Wendy Everly, tells us the occasion that she first became aware that she was a “monster.�� She was six years old and throwing a tantrum at her own perfectly nice birthday party. But we can’t quite dismiss little Wendy as nothing but a brat, because her father died very shortly before her birthday.

Wendy storms back to the kitchen to yell at her mother for buying her a chocolate cake when Mommy knows full well that Wendy doesn’t like chocolate—this is the reader’s first major clue that something’s wrong with Wendy. For this, the spoiled child deserves perhaps to be sent to bed early, lose dessert privileges, or get bopped on the head with a rolled-up newspaper.

But no, Wendy’s mother declares that the little girl is a monster and no offspring of hers. She stabs at Wendy erratically with a large knife, and probably would have killed her had not eleven-year-old Matt, her biological son, stepped in just there. As is, Wendy has a giant scar on her stomach that will stay forever.

Fast-forward eleven years. Matt and Wendy live with their aunt Maggie, their mother having been institutionalized shortly after the knife incident. Matt has done all right for himself, but Wendy has bombed out of several public schools, and has a rep for being sullen, difficult and rather stupid, all of which is true.

There’s a boy in one of Wendy’s classes who stares at her. He has black hair and pale skin and beautiful dark eyes, and his name is Finn. On the day our story begins, Wendy decides to ask him why he stares. “Everyone stares at you,�� he replies with no visible emotion. “You’re very attractive.�� He’s a lot like every other sulky, leather-jacket-wearing, late 2000s paranormal YA love interest, but unlike Edward Cullen or Jace Wayland, Finn just spits it right out. Credit where credit is due.

Why is he named Finn, though? A guy named Finn is almost always a wholesome character. He’s supposed to be a farm boy who shelters fugitive princesses and wears the sweaters his momma knitted for him, or a former Stormtrooper with a heart full of empathy for Resistance pilots, scavenger orphans, mechanics, and space goats. Same goes for a lad named Ben, James, Sam, or Will. The emotionally-unavailable bad boy with a hidden heart of gold archetype is more likely to be named something like Nick or Jack.

Finn also tells Wendy that he’s noticed her ability to think something at someone and make them change their mind. She has always been able to do this—say, she looks at an angry teacher and thinks “You aren’t going to send me to the principal�� and the teacher, a bit befuddled, sits down and tells her “You don’t have to go to the principal’s office.�� Sometimes she wonders if this is what her mom meant about her being a monster. At any rate, it frightens her that Finn (or anyone, for that matter) knows of this talent of hers.

She uses this talent to persuade Matt, who knows better and is very worried, to drive her to the asylum for an audience with their mom. Wendy interrogates the woman but comes away with little she didn’t already know. Her mother raves that Wendy, as a baby, somehow disposed of Michael, the mother’s biological second son, and substituted herself. Matt dismisses this as the ranting of a lunatic but his sister thinks there might be some truth to it.

Wendy goes to the school dance for the first time ever, solely to talk with Finn some more, but he says something callous, she becomes enraged, and she hurriedly leaves before he can explain. Good thing he just decided to climb through her bedroom window and explain it to her anyway. This is one of a few spots where the book treads a little too close to Twilight, although given the changeling theme, it could also be a nod to Peter Pan (our heroine’s name is Wendy, after all) or Labyrinth (albeit Jareth is much, much cooler than Finn).

Did I say changeling? Turns out that Wendy is not only adopted, she’s not even technically human. She belongs to a race of creatures from Norse folklore called the Trylle—known to humans as trolls, but not to be confused with the monsters that live under bridges and/or eat jellied Dwarves.



Nope, these trolls—er, Trylle—look human enough, although they’re prettier than most of us and might have a green undertone to their skin.

The Trylle culture is dying out. For the past several generations they have swapped their royal/high-ranking babies with human infants, so the Trylle babies can acquire wealth and education while in human society, then bring at least some of that back to their true people once they return. Finn is a Tracker, a low-ranking Trylle whose job is to find adolescent changelings and bring them home. And Wendy is the only daughter of the Trylle Queen, the inexorable Elora.

Finn wants Wendy to come to the hidden Trylle stronghold in Minnesota with him, but she hedges, thinking of the worry she’d cause her aunt and especially her brother. Then she gets attacked by a rival band of Trylle, called the Vittra, and realizes she endangers her human family if she stays��

Content Advisory
Violence: Stylized, action-movie style fights between the Trylle and the Vittra. Very little actual weaponry used. Lots of punching and flying through windows. No gorier than the average Rick Riordan book.

Sex: Finn and Wendy make out a few times, despite not knowing each other well at all. The night before he has to leave the settlement, he spends snuggling in bed with her—snuggling is all they do. Before that, she suspected that her mother had a creepy, Mrs. Robinson-like relationship with him; in reality, (view spoiler)[Elora had been in love with Finn’s father and had some sort of maternal feeling for him, which she squelched as soon as she realized he liked her daughter and was a threat to the Trylle aristocracy. (hide spoiler)] Elora is currently having an affair with a Trylle lord, the father of one of Wendy’s new friends, which is thankfully not shown in any detail.

Rhys invites Wendy to join him for a Lord of the Rings marathon and she falls asleep on his couch. Finn gets there and assumes the absolute worst, despite a lack of any real evidence.

Language: There’s one F-bomb and a variety of less pungent four-letter words in here.

Substance Abuse: Social champagne drinking, including by the underage and very awkward Wendy.

Nightmare Fuel: Nothing.

Politics and Religion: Nothing.

Conclusion
Switched is definitely part of the post-Twilight paranormal trend: awkward brown-haired heroine, sulky love interest with no concept of personal space, glamorous hidden society in some rural part of America��.too much melodrama for a story that just started and characters we barely know, and prose that veers from fine to patchy.

This paperback edition includes four bonus chapters called “The Vittra Attack.�� The publisher labels this a short story but it isn’t—it has no arc of its own and is hard to follow until you finally see where it connects to the main body of the story. These four chapters are from the POV of a Vittra named Loki, whom I assure you I was not picturing as Tom Hiddleston with long black hair.



Ahem. Loki drives the getaway car for the two Vittra who tried to capture Wendy. He gets pushed around by the Vittra king, but is close to their queen, for some reason. Loki is never shown or mentioned in the book proper, so I don’t know why Hocking considered him important enough for his own bonus chapters. At any rate, the book would have been improved if his chapters were woven into the main book—it would have added at least some sense of urgency.

It’s silly, fast-paced, not terribly deep, and enjoyable enough that I’ll probably read the second book. It’s a good deal better than the aforementioned Twilight Saga or the Mortal Instruments series, but not nearly as much fun as the Percy Jackson books.

If you want a melodramatic YA urban fantasy trilogy that’s actually mostly good, though, check out A.G. Howard’s Splintered trilogy. It has one very annoying major character, but the prose and worldbuilding are solid.