The Switch

The Switch
Author(s)
Publisher
Age Range
8+
Release Date
November 01, 2022
ISBN
978-0545803502
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On the morning of Henry Ludd's thirteenth birthday, the power goes out. No phones, no news, and planes are literally falling out of the sky. Henry's father was away from the family farm and he has not returned. It's worrisome as people descend into lawlessness.

Four months later, the electricity still hasn't come back. While Henry's family is protected in their walled compound with wind turbines fueling their electricity, the rest of their area has suffered. Henry's father still hasn’t been found. Determined to find him, Henry ventures out with a trading crew to the zoo where his dad was last seen. After the truck is hijacked and Henry is left behind, he's forced to travel alone through the unruly world of the Switch. But his journey home will lead him to cross paths with the people who took his dad and have been trying to take over his family's land and resources ever since.

Editor review

1 review
This is how the world will end...
Overall rating
 
4.7
Plot
 
4.0
Characters
 
5.0
Writing Style
 
5.0
Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)
 
N/A
Henry Carter lives on a farm with his extended family near Portland. His father is the head of a zoo in the city, and his sometimes quirky relatives work on the farm. One uncle, Edgar, has put up a wind turbine despite the objections of some of the family. When an electromagnetic pulse causes all of the electronics to stop working, planes fall from the air, cars don't run, and chaos ensues. The wind turbine gives the Carter clan a rare advantage of having power, so they close ranks and try to protect their compound. One plane that went down is near the farm, and since some of the passengers were neighbors, the family has to clean up the wreckage and bury the victims. One of these, Caroline, was a classmate of Henry's, and he hears her voice in his head throughout the book. When Henry's father doesn't return home, he sets off with two uncles to try to find him. Portland is a huge mess, and no one is at the zoo but Henry's birthday present, a dog named Gort, and a zoo keeper, Derek. When the family truck goes missing with the uncles in it, Henry teams up with a Portland girl, Robin, to travel to the Rabbit Hole where they think they have been taken. Run by the leader of an animal rights group that had been protesting at the zoo, the Rabbit Hole has taken in a number of people and are rumored to want to take down the community run by Henry's mother. Using a map and following the smell of cooking beef (the truck the uncles were driving had a quantity of meat in it), Henry and Robin manage to find the group and get accepted in, hoping to get the uncles out. This is a hard prospect, since the leader is very strict and has intense helpers, and also might know more about Henry that is healthy. Will Henry be able to make it back to his family? And will he ever find out the fate of his father?
Good Points
This one was so hard for me to read, because this is how the world will end, people! We are all so reliant on power and technology that this is really the most likely scenario for the collapse of civilization. We'd all like to think we would have access to a community like Henry's family's farm, but it's far more likely that I would raise my own food and find a water source only to be killed by gun toting maniacs who want the 48 jars of peanut butter in my basement. Oh, the book? Lots of good details about how Henry's family survives, great adventure going into Portland, a mystery to be solved with Henry's father, and a confrontation with evil, somewhat unbalanced adversaries. Things are looking up a bit at the end of the book, and this seems like a stand alone, but there could be a sequel. Definitely a book that will be popular with reader who like dystopian tales as well as survival and adventure stories.

Henry starts a journal at the beginning of the book, but then stops rather abruptly. The idea that he hears Caroline talking to him was a bit odd. I wish that he had been old enough to drive, but the uncles with whom he travels are used in a very effective way.

Offer this to fans of Philbrick's The Big Dark (which at least ends with the power coming back on), Esplin's 96 Miles, or Eric Walters' fantastic Rule of Thre3 series. I have three copies of the latter that are all very worn, and it's a series that my readers frequently revisit. I was a big fan of O'Brien's Z for Zachariah in middle school, and The Switch reminded me of the 1974 Made for TV movie Where Have All the People Gone with Peter Graves, except in that one the electormagnetic pulse killed a lot more people and left the cars alone if they weren't running at the time. I can still recall a scene where the characters got keys from an employee key rack in a grocery store and tried to get a car to start. And look! It's available in its fuzzy, full length glory on YouTube!
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