Switched

This is the book that made self-publishing into a headline. Amanda Hocking put Switched up as an e-book in 2010, sold a handful of copies in the first month, and then watched her nine books turn into a million copies and roughly two million dollars by early 2011. St. Martin's Press signed her to a four-book, two-million-dollar deal, and the trilogy got a hardcover reissue with a new bonus story. All of that commercial noise can make the actual novel hard to see, so here is the useful question: if this had come out from a traditional publisher with no story attached, would it hold up? Mostly, yes, in the way that a well-made candy bar holds up. It is fast, it is sweet, it knows what it wants to be, and it does not pretend to be a meal.

The Birthday and the Knife

The prologue does more work than the first fifty pages that follow. Wendy Everly is six years old, angry about porcelain dolls and a chocolate cake at her birthday party, and she throws the kind of tantrum that six-year-olds throw. Her mother Kim picks up a large kitchen knife and comes at her, screaming that she is not her daughter, and Wendy's older brother Matt pulls her away and calls for help. Kim spends the next eleven years in institutions. It is a terrifying opening, and it plants the mystery the entire trilogy grows from: what did Kim see in her daughter that made a loving mother try to kill her?

Wendy is seventeen when the main story starts. She lives with Matt, who gave up most of his own life to raise her, and their aunt Maggie. She has been expelled from school after school for fighting, usually in defense of somebody smaller, and she is on her last chance at a new high school in a new Minnesota town. She is short, pale, and strange-looking, with dark eyes that unsettle people, and she has a power she has never told anyone about. If she looks someone in the eye and tells them to do something, they do it. She calls it persuasion, and she uses it rarely, because it frightens her.

Finn Holmes and the Dance

The first school day brings Finn Holmes, a new student who stares at Wendy across the hallway with a focus that is close to rude. He is tall, dark-eyed, and dressed like a boy from another era, and he asks her to the fall dance in a way that sounds less like an invitation and more like a decision. The dance goes badly. Finn ignores her, then lectures her, and Wendy, frustrated and embarrassed, persuades a boy at the next table to take her home. That is the mistake that changes everything.

Finn appears at her bedroom window that night, which is not a thing that happens in ordinary Minnesota life, and tells her the truth. She is a changeling. When she was born, she was swapped with a human baby, and she is a Trylle, a troll, of the hidden kingdom of Forening. Tracking down changelings and bringing them home is what Finn does; he is a tracker, and Wendy is his assignment. The persuasion is Trylle magic. The mother who tried to kill her was not crazy, at least not about this.

Wendy does what a reasonable person does and refuses to believe him, until she visits Kim. Her mother, calmer now, tells her what the doctors had told her all those years ago: she was pregnant with a boy. The girl in her crib was not the child she gave birth to. Wendy starts to believe, and then the Vittra try to kidnap her.

The Other Trolls

The attack comes while Wendy is out walking. Two Vittra trackers, led by a man named Jen, try to take her, and Finn fights them off, badly hurt. The Vittra are a rival band of trolls, and they want Wendy for reasons the first book only hints at. Finn decides she is not safe anywhere in the human world, and takes her to Forening, the hidden Trylle community in the Minnesota woods.

Forening is the most interesting thing in the novel and it gets the least development. It is a gated town in the middle of nowhere, full of beautiful, cold people who live off money sent home by changelings placed with rich human families. The society runs on bloodlines and class. At the top are the Queen and the Marksinna, the noblewomen. In the middle are ordinary Trylle. At the bottom, treated as servants and worse, are trackers and mänsklig, the latter being the human children who were taken back from their changeling placements, like Rhys, the boy exchanged for Wendy.

Wendy's mother is Queen Elora, who is exactly as warm as her position suggests. Elora is beautiful, precise, and disappointed. She wants Wendy to be a princess, which means learning decorum, sitting in council, and eventually taking a place she never asked for. There is a wonderful, uncomfortable dinner scene where Wendy accidentally calls a council member a name under her breath and Elora punishes her with a look. The queen never apologizes for anything, and the book never makes her into a secret softie, which is a real strength. She is a politician first, and Wendy is an asset.

Rhys and the Human Trade

Wendy and Rhys become friends, and Rhys is the best supporting character in the book. He is cheerful and kind and works in the kitchens. He also knows exactly what his existence means. He is the son Kim gave birth to, and the same system that gave Wendy a rich human childhood traded Rhys into a life of labor so that a Trylle family could place their child with the Everlys. Rhys is not angry at Wendy for it, but the book does not let the exchange off the hook. When Wendy points out that the practice is monstrous, everyone around her calls it tradition.

That is the novel's real theme, and it is handled more smartly than the romance. Forening is a society that treats people as investments. Changelings are placed with human families for their money, and returns are expected around age eighteen when the inheritances have matured. The lower classes are expected to be grateful. Wendy's "persuasion" turns out to be a rare and valuable power, which makes her a useful tool for Elora, and the book is honest about that: the queen loves her, maybe, but she needs her more.

Training, Romance, and a Locked Room

Finn becomes Wendy's tutor, and the tutoring sessions are the best scenes in the book. He explains Trylle history and etiquette with the stiff formality of a soldier reading a manual, and Wendy teases him until the formality cracks. Their relationship is built on the oldest version of the forbidden love plot, the princess and the tracker, but it works because Wendy is genuinely lonely and Finn is genuinely conflicted. He tells her he was sent to watch her for years before he introduced himself. She asks why he was staring at her at school. He says he was looking at her because he could not look away, and she tells him that this is a little creepy, and he promises to work on being less creepy. It is one of the few exchanges that reads as real teenagers rather than characters.

There is also a locked room with paintings in it, which is the closest the book gets to horror. Elora's Trylle gift is precognition, and it only comes out through painting, so the locked room is full of canvases showing futures she has glimpsed. Wendy finds a painting of herself, which is a fine gothic touch in a book that otherwise stays sunny.

Willa, a noble girl, becomes Wendy's friend, and Tove, a young Markis with psychokinesis, becomes the most useful possible ally. Tove is also the character the book treats most casually. He is withdrawn, powerful, and quietly controlled by the same system that is controlling Wendy, and the trilogy's deeper politics live largely in his subplot, waiting to be used.

The Kingdom Nobody Examines

Forening is the most interesting thing in the novel and it gets the least development, which is worth unpacking. The town runs on changelings placed with wealthy human families, and the money those children send home pays for the gated houses and the beautiful clothes and the whole calm economy of the place. Every noble family in Forening is living on a child they gave away. The mänsklig, the human children who came back in the trade, work in the kitchens. Rhys works in the kitchens. Nobody thinks this is strange except Wendy, and when she says so out loud, the adults around her explain that this is simply how things are done. It is the sharpest political idea Hocking has, and the book keeps bumping into it without ever stopping to stare.

The skills system has the same half-finished quality. Persuasion, psychokinesis, precognition through painting: each power is attached to a bloodline, and the bloodlines are the class system. Tove is a Markis whose power makes him valuable and isolated at the same time, and Willa is a friend who is also a future political actor. Nothing in Forening is casual, and the trilogy spends its later volumes making that clear. In this book, the reader gets just enough to feel the cold.

The Ball and the Vittra

The book ends with an introduction ball, where Wendy is supposed to meet Forening society as Princess Wendy. Instead, the Vittra crash the party. Jen fights Wendy directly, Rhys gets knocked unconscious trying to protect her, and Finn, who has been dismissed from his position, comes back and nearly dies defending her. Tove saves Finn's life with his power and drives the Vittra off, and the ball turns into a hospital scene.

The aftermath is where the book earns its ending. Elora tells Wendy that Finn has been reassigned, because a tracker can never be with a princess, and the rules of Forening do not bend for anyone. Wendy, who has spent eleven years being dragged around by other people's decisions, does the only thing she has left. She finds Rhys, persuades him to drive her out of Forening, and leaves.

That is the whole first book. She goes home to Matt and Maggie, and the reader knows the Vittra will not wait patiently and that the questions about her own father, which the trilogy answers later, have only been delayed.

What Holds Up and What Does Not

Switched is a fast read with a clean hook, and Hocking's pacing instincts are excellent. The prologue is genuinely disturbing, the troll mythology is a fresh house built on a familiar foundation, and the class politics of Forening are more interesting than the love story. Wendy is likable. Matt, the brother who sacrificed his twenties, is more affecting than Finn, and the book deserves credit for making family the emotional center instead of the romance.

The criticisms are just as real. The prose is plain to the point of flatness in places, with sentences that repeat information the reader already has. The romance moves fast because the plot needs it to, not because the characters have earned it. Forening is full of ideas that the book never slows down to examine: the changeling economy, the tracking of children, the treatment of the mänsklig. Kirkus warned vampire and werewolf fans to expect something different, and reviewers at the time called the book candy, which it is. It is candy with a knife in the first chapter. The New York Times Magazine's portrait of Hocking called her writing a mash-up of creativity and commerce, and this book is the clearest example of what that phrase means. It is not trying to be literature. It is trying to keep you up past your bedtime, and it does.

One practical note for readers picking up the paperback: the 2012 St. Martin's edition adds a short bonus story called "The Vittra Attacks," which fills in some of the attack on the Everly house from the perspective of the Vittra themselves, and it changes how the opening chapters read on a second pass. The trilogy was also optioned for film years before any of the current fantasy boom, with a screenplay commissioned in 2011, and the rights eventually returned to Hocking without a movie ever being made. At this point the books are their own monument, independent of any adaptation, and Switched remains the one that changed the economics of self-publishing for everyone who followed.