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**Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin Random House/Dutton Books for an eARC in exchange for an honest review of this title. This in no way changed my rating**

**Please be aware there are some spoilers due to some content that may be emotionally expensive for some readers to handle**

This was easily one of my most anticipated reads of the year. I started reading A.S. King's books about 2 years ago and have been slowly working my way through her body of work since then. While King is known for her work in the genre of Magical Realism, I think this one will be a standout in that it's very strange and I think will be harder for the average reader to grasp the message.

In Switch, the main character, Truda "Tru" Becker, lives in a society where time has stopped. It has been the same day for approximately 9 months and high school students have been tasked with "finding the solution" to lack of time (or excess of it, depending on how you look at it). This situation will feel very familiar to people reading it when it is published as this lack/excess of time is similar to how many of us have felt during the COVID pandemic and subsequent shutdowns. However, there are (too) many extra plot points worked into the narrative. Throughout the book, we have plot lines including:

-a shifting house full of plywood boxes created by Tru's dad
-a never present on the page sibling who is a narcissistic liar. It is implied she sexually assaulted Tru as a child, as well
-a broken relationship between Tru's parents
-another sibling who is convinced he has done something illegal and continues to harbor those feelings due to the vindictive lies of the narcissistic sibling from before
-Tru joining the track team and being amazing at javelin
-Plutchik's wheel of emotions and how psychology will save time if people start to care about one another
-Certain children developing anomalous abilities during the shutdown, such as the ability to fly

These are SEVEN additional plot lines and some of them are not solved very satisfactorily. Personally, I feel the track and field/children with anomalous abilities could have been scrapped. I feel like they were included to help the reader come to the conclusion that time is a meaningless concept and that they should do what they love instead of bowing to time. However, I think the plot points here become muddied and make it harder to understand the metaphor of the house rotating and the grief/working through Plutchik's wheel that the family has to go through to grow and move on.

I'm also unsure if Tru is meant to be an untrustworthy narrator? It feels simultaneously like she is and also like she's honest to a fault. The family members all have secrets that need to be exposed and worked through throughout the narrative, while Tru does not. So that makes me wonder if that was because she genuinely doesn't have one or because she's unreliable and doesn't share it with us as readers.

The writing is very easy to read. It reads similar to a book of poems and has a lot of what look like stanza lines (line here/ line here/ line here, etc.). This makes it very quick, along with the length of the book being quite short. I'm sure the forward slashes are meant to be stand-ins for the symbol for flow of energy on a power grid, as she discusses energy quite a bit, but it does add to the readability of the title.

All in all, while I think there are going to be people who are fans of this book, this wasn't my favorite of King's titles. The addition of too many plot points made it hard for it to topple favorites like Still Life with Tornado and Dig. However, I think this is a passable book about time as a construct which will resonate with those of us who have lived through this time period and will help explain that feeling to later readers who didn't.

3.5 stars/5 (rounded to 4 for Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ)