Game Changer
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Ash is used to taking hits on the field for his high school football team – until he takes one that doesn’t just impact his body, but his whole reality. It starts with one small shift, but with every game, every hit, Ash finds himself pushed through a succession of universes almost-but-not-really like his own, until the small shifts in reality become significant shifts in Ash’s own identity. As Ash experiences life from other perspectives, he starts to question the world he thought he knew, as well as the ones he finds himself catapulted into. For better or worse, the one thing Ash knows is that he’s got to find a way to put things back. A searing exploration of race, gender, sexuality and the nature of privilege.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A straight, white, cisgender teen is confronted with his own privilege via iterative realities in Printz Honoree Shusterman's (Scythe) ambitious speculative novel. In the first game of his senior year, defensive tackle Ash Bowman feels a strange sensation while sacking the opposing team's quarterback. That night, he discovers that stop signs are now blue instead of red, and no one remembers otherwise. The next time it happens, Ash enters a wealthy existence where his family swaps tract housing for a gated community, and a third tackle has him attending an all-white high school in a world where segregation never ended. As each hit spins Ash further from the reality he knows, he finds himself grappling with realities of class, gender, race, and sexuality. Some gratifyingly complex character relationships help balance the action, but centering the privileged protagonist's limited perspective means that characters with more intersectionally layered identities come off as secondary. Shusterman's tackling of so many nuanced subjects fails to focus sufficiently on each, resulting in a thought-provoking work that only skims the surface. Ages 14–up. ■
