The Switch by A. W. Hill and Nathaniel Hill
Published: August 28th 2017 by Curiosity Quills Press
IMAGINE THAT you could change your world with the flip of a switch. You might be prettier, more athletic, more popular, or even living on an exotic island, because your history—your world line—would be different. But here’s the catch: you have no way of knowing if the reality on the other side of that switch will be better… or much worse.
JACOBUS ROSE is a fifteen year-old who believes—as many fifteen year-olds do—that his life could use improvement. School is a numbing routine, and his parents’ marriage seems to be imploding before his eyes. ‘Maybe I was born into the wrong world,’ he thinks. Lured by his best friend, CONNOR, into a strange little house containing nothing but empty rooms and an oversized circuit breaker, he’ll discover that reality comes in a plural form, and that our choices create a continuous web of branching worlds, any of which is as ‘real’ as another.
A solo odyssey becomes a duo, a trio, and then a quartet, as Jacobus befriends other interdimensional travelers along the way: GORDON NIGHTSHADE, the veteran pilgrim and chief theorist; MOSES DeWITT, the alley cat with an old soul; JEMMA DOONE, a girl of many-worlds who becomes the main river home for Jacobus and his crew; and finally, his lost friend Connor, who just may have preferred an alternate universe to his own.
THE SWITCH is the story of their journey home. The question is: if they get there, will it be the same place they left behind?
Note: I received a review copy of this book via Netgalley. This in no way influences my opinion.
I first discovered this book on Netgalley. The cover is eye catching and the premise sounded extremely promising – so of course, I had to request it! However, for me, this book fell flat and didn’t live up to its promise – I ended up DNFing.
I think my biggest issue with this book was the writing style itself. Whilst I don’t mind the author breaking the fourth wall and having the characters’ speak directly to the reader, it has to be done right for it be successful. For me, it wasn’t done right and was written more as if the character was stood with me talking to me, rather than hooking me into the story itself. The writing was very much “and then this happened, and then that happened…” which irritated and bored me. The writing style itself affected the execution and it just didn’t work for me.
Another issue I had with this book was the plot. Whilst the premise sounded extremely promising, I don’t feel that the plot lived up to my expectations. It was relatively repetitive, which made me want to put the book down and do something else. I loved the idea of multiple realities and all of them being different, but I would have liked to have seen more of the reality that he switched to before he switched again. The multiple switches in such a short space of time meant that we didn’t really get to see a lot from the other characters and how they changed etc.
Which brings us to the next issue, which was the characters. They fell mostly flat for me, but I think that was because the authors didn’t give us enough time to really get to know and care about the characters before switching them out for another reality and a new set of personalities. I didn’t have that reader/character connection because I felt that I wasn’t given the opportunity to really get to know anyone other than Jacobus
All in all, I was pretty disappointed with this book. Whilst the premise itself was extremely promising, I don’t feel that it lived up to that promise. I gave this 1/5 stars.
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