Trylle's Switched: Okay Start for a Snazzy Trilogy

Title:  Switched

Author:  Amanda Hocking

Format:  Kindle

Rating:  5 / 10

When Wendy Everly was six-years-old, her mother was convinced she was a monster and tried to kill her. It isn't until eleven years later that Wendy finds out her mother might've been telling the truth. 

With the help of Finn Holmes, Wendy finds herself in a world she never knew existed - and it's one she's not sure if she wants to be a part of.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while.  I know tons of people have reviewed it, but there are just a few things that I haven’t really seen mentioned that I think need to be addressed.  I’ve read four (about to be five) books by Hocking and of them all, Switched is my least favorite.  The two sequels, Torn and Ascend, really showcase Hocking’s great talent for fast-paced drama, quirky characterization, and guilty-pleasure romance.  Switched just doesn’t seem to fit. 

That isn’t to say that it’s a bad book.  As far as your superstar paranormal romance authors are concerned (yes, we’re talking Stephenie Meyer here) she has a much better grasp on drama.  The psycho-mother prologue yanks you into the story, since (a) what heartless reader wouldn’t feel bad for a six-year-old being attacked by her mother and (b) it’s impossible to read that scene and not long to know what terrible truth made Kim Everly try to kill her daughter.  Then suddenly, we meet Wendy’s potential stalker, who can barely reveal her real past to her before the baddies come to attack.  Hocking doesn’t waste time with long opening expositions; she lets you meet her characters on the fly and make your own impressions, which is always appreciated. 

Unfortunately, the gripping pace that she keeps up through My Blood Approves, Fate, and Flutter is derailed in Switched.  The beginning is frenetic.  Wendy is barely introduced before we learn the mystery of Finn Holmes, her heart is won and broken by Finn, and she finds out her true Trylle heritage.  Her romance with Finn, one of the key elements of Switched and still integral in Torn and Ascend, begins with a few teenage heart flutters, staring contests, and about three minutes of dancing.  Suddenly they’re in love, even though almost every conversation they have throughout the first part of the book reads like a Trylle lesson.  All they’ve got is a well of sexual tension, which is enough for teenage infatuation but doesn’t properly set up the intense love they allegedly share by the second book.  Unfortunately, his hard, excessively dutiful personality makes a genuine emotional relationship between the two difficult to swallow.  (And what’s so “endearing” about being a “damn psychopath”, I want to know?  Let’s nip the trend of stalker-crushes in the bud.) 

She won me back with Rhys, Willa, Elora, and Tove, supporting characters who often steal the show from Wendy with their strong personalities.  Tove, the quirky, distractible son of a rival noble, is probably my favorite character in the whole series (if you don’t count the generic but adorably snarky Loki, introduced in Torn).  Yet, like most of the characters, Tove doesn’t truly shine in Switched, receiving only brief, unsatisfactory cameos.  Wendy is the best developed; her frantic personality kept me reading even when the plot lagged into long Trylle-history lessons.  While often confused and useless, she’s no Bella Swan.  She knows that she’s unprepared.  That doesn’t mean she accepts it.  She’s not afraid to take control of her own destiny, even if it means calling out Finn for his annoying complacence, going against her scary royal mother’s wishes, or doing a bit of her own investigating. 

Unfortunately, even Wendy’s endearing personality isn’t enough to overshadow a plot that reads a lot like a history lesson; you know to be worried when there’s a chapter titled “Further Instruction”.  Wendy spends a really long time learning about Trylle life and not a whole lot of time living it.  The super neat abilities, like mind control and telekinesis, hardly even come into play until the last quarter of the book.  Follow it up with an ending so abrupt that I thought I might be missing pages, and I was left feeling like something was missing.  I will say:  I cared enough about Wendy that I still read the sequel, even though I was ambivalent about the first book.  

But here comes my pet peeve:  Trylle worldbuilding.  Being rather fond of the Swedes, I was disconcerted to see their language appropriated wholesale without a good reason.  “Trylle” is just the plural for trolls.  A quick Google of “mansklig” ruined one plot surprise long before Wendy even thought to ask about it.  However other words like “markis” and “marksinna” just appear to be made up.  Considering the Trylle live so separately from humans, I wonder they didn’t invent their own language.  Also, while not mentioned in the first book, I find it relevant to note that “Tryllic”, the language of Trylle, is written in a script stolen wholesale from Cyrillic (and if you take a couple seconds to Google them, you’ll realize that, contrary to how the script is described in the glossary, it’s impossible for that script to look exactly like both Cyrillic and Arabic, or to look like Cyrillic but not Greek).

The world of the Trylle with their changelings and abilities is fascinating and refreshing in a vampire-dominated market, but propped up by someone else’s haphazardly appropriated culture, it feels sketchily constructed.  As for the trolls, they follow the trend of sapping old world myths of their most basic elements.  Like fangless, sun-walking vampires, they resemble their mythological kin only in name.  They’re basically sexy, brown-haired witches who happen to use changelings (the logic Finn uses to convince Wendy she’s a troll is tragically comical).  The Trylle are interesting creatures in their own right with abilities that, unlike most supernaturals, actually have important consequences.  I’d love to read about them.  But call them trolls, and I just don’t see the connection. 

To end what has become an unintentionally long review, I will say this.  Switched is a mediocre introduction to its two fast-paced, fascinating sequels.  While Torn and Ascend don’t solve all the worldbuilding problems of Switched, and suffer from their predecessor’s sketchy underpinnings, they do shine as gems of indie YA romance, with characters you can care about and page-turning plots.  So yes, read Switched because it’s a gateway to the other two; but don’t expect Hocking’s best, because she’s saved it for the sequels.