A surreal and timely novel about isolation and human connection from Michael L. Printz Award winner A.S. King.
Tru Beck is a teenage girl from Pennsylvania who lives in a world that has become trapped in a fold in time and space, where “real” time has stopped but humanity continues to mark artificial time based on a website called N3WCLOCK.com. Tru lives in a house that has a switch at its center. No one knows what the switch controls, but her father continually builds larger and larger boxes around the switch (Tru lives in Box #7). Tru leaves the box through a Tru-shaped hole to go to school, where she pays no attention to the new “Solution Time” curriculum. In fact, the only interesting thing that’s ever happened to Tru at school is when she discovers (on her first try) that she can throw a javelin farther than any human has ever thrown anything before in human history.
Review
Thank you Bookishfirst and the publisher for a copy in exchange for an honest review.
I am not even sure what this book was about. The publisher's summary makes it sound interesting but in reality, the book isn’t about much. This whole book is just about flipping a switch in a house that is covered and separated by different boxes. Not sure why there are so many different boxes in their house because not all of them are protecting this switch.
I am going to start with the one thing I did 'like' in this book. Probably the only thing that held my attention in this story was the mystery surrounding the sister of the main girl and her brother. There is a battle they fight to try and separate themselves from the manipulation, lies, and abuse this sister has caused. She has told so many lies and for me, this added a nice suspenseful mysterious character to the story who you are trying to figure out. She is only briefly mentioned in the beginning but then we learn more little by little as it is revealed. This was done really well to help build some backstory to the characters and to add some needed conflict and feeling into the book.
But now the things that I personally didn't enjoy in this book.
It didn’t feel like a finished book. While reading it, it felt like a rough draft with only half a thought not fully formed and executed. This had a lot to do with how the book was written, which I have never seen before. Instead of writing things in complete sentences the book was written abbreviated with backslashes between each thought. A lot of the instances this was used was to resay the same thing in many different ways. Kind of how you would writing a book trying to decide which word or phrase to use. But instead of picking one this book has them all.
Having everything abbreviated moved the story along so it felt like it was moving very fast from topic to topic. I would like this face-paced normally but sadly this book was faced past into more stuff that didn’t matter.
At the beginning of the book, I was very lost with what was happening. Things were not clearly explained. The main reason it was so hard to understand was that what was happening made no sense at all. It took a while to wrap my head around what was happening. Then halfway through when something else happened I would go through this process all over again to try and figure the insanity of what was happening, and that isn’t good insanity. When I normally use that word it is in a good way by saying it was entertaining but this book was just plain weird. I really do not get the point of this book. This is very disappointing because the plot sounded interesting but how it was executed was very poor in my opinion.
It was also very unrealistic. Yes, I know time-stopping is unrealistic but I mean with how the characters acted. Like the main girl could stop time, which randomly appeared with no explanation. It felt very thrown in and random. We have already read like half the book and then suddenly she can make everyone pause. The first time she does it, it is like she has already done it a million times. She doesn’t question it and then just continues to randomly do it with no explanation.
Then when she would do things while everyone else was paused, when they came back to and had their things missing, nothing happened. They acted like it was all completely normal. This could have been used to further the story and develop some suspense and tension but nope, they again just accepted it without anything further.
Then my main problem was the time-stopping part. This was also something that made no sense to me. Like this sounds like a very cool sci-fi/dystopian plot idea but how it was done in this book, took this idea and made it horrible. To be honest it was made so that the only real thing was that the clocks stopped ticking and technically it was June 23, 2020, but everything else was the same. The sun still rose and set, the earth still rotated on its axis changing the seasons. So with this new clock that was designed, I don’t understand how time stopped. Nothing was different then if time hadn’t stopped. So basically the story was just saying time stopped with nothing being changed or affected by that.
Then the ending was a little better than the rest of the book but also disappointing. It could have been used to develop something very interesting but sadly it didn’t go that way. The ending was forced and pretty bland.
TW: Suicidal Thoughts, Abuse, Rape