Multiverse!!! So satisfied and happy and my imagination is firing all over the place and I wanna go on that ride again!!! Dialling … 1-2-3-0-0 …
I did the Dory thing with The Switch. I was so excited to read it and then before I started I got distracted by “ooh look, a book!”. New ones piled up and while this one wasn’t forgotten it lay in the middle of my brain trying desperately to climb its way to the top. So I’m late reading this one and kicking myself for it because I could’ve been living in Jacobus’ worlds weeks ago! Well, I’m here now and wow, what a ride!
The moral to this story (option 1): If you see a switch in a red house on a truck that’s not connected to electricity yet has a lightbulb turned on inside and there’s a sign in Latin next to the switch, maybe pop those words into Google and translate them before you flick the switch. Unless you’re Jacobus or Connor. If you are, just go for it!!!
As I was reading this book I kept thinking back to being obsessed with The Butterfly Effect when the first movie was released. For me, this was so many levels above The Butterfly Effect. The characters in this book weren’t the only travellers. I travelled with them through all of the worlds and I want to experience it all over again. I don’t know the last time I used this word but I kept thinking as I was reading that this book is exquisite. Father and son team A.W. Hill and Nathanael Hill have exploded my brain in such a wonderful way!
It is deep, so deep you could get in over your head if you don’t pay attention but if you take the time to read carefully, you’ll be rewarded greatly. The way that the knowledge of how travelling works is doled out in bite sized pieces is fantastic because otherwise my brain could have exploded from information overload instead, but as the characters learned more, I learned more. Then each time my brain said, “But hold on. How does that work? Why did that happen?”, one of the characters would ask something similar and my answer would come, usually from sweet, adorable, geeky, wise, catcher outfit wearing Gordon.
I know just enough sciencey stuff to be dangerous but not enough to be able to discuss the scientific validity of the events in this book so I’ll leave that for a different breed of nerd. However I was given the imagination bone (Huh? It’s not a bone?) and from an imagination standpoint, the authors get a jumping up and down ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ from me. As a token of my appreciation I gathered each star from a different world for them and boy, was it awkward carrying them all home!
Some serious thought has gone into the way the universes work in The Switch – which rules apply universally, which rules rely on whether you pulled a switch or not, which parts of you remain you regardless of the universe you’re in.
I love a story that whets my appetite and makes me want to learn more. The Switch did that for me. I’ve had Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos calling me for way too long and I long to read that and then come back to experience The Switch again, this time as a sciencey-type person.
The moral to this story (option 2): The grass is not always greener on the other side. Who knows whether their grass is green or if they even have grass over there at all?!
In case you can’t tell, I loved this book. I loved the characters. I loved the concept. I loved the execution. I love that it got my brain all tingly, wanting to learn. I love that it got my imagination doing gymnastics in my mind. I love the message that our choices have the power to change our world.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Curiosity Quills Press for the opportunity to read this book.
And now it’s time for a word from our sponsor:
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Once Upon a Blurb
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?
Schizanthus Nerd 