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I do love a Neal Shusterman book. Unwind is one of my favorite YA novels of all time, and I hugely enjoyed Dry when I reviewed it back in 2018. Shusterman is back with a new book, and it’s a… no, that would be too easy. Game Changer is not a paradigm-shifting novel set to change the history of young adult publishing, but it is a very very good book.
What is Game Changer?
The novel has a simple premise, one similar to that found in Quantum Leap. Except where Sam Beckett found himself bouncing into different bodies, here narrator Ash stays the same, but the world around him shifts. Ash is a linebacker for his college team, great at his job, but as is usually the case for defensive positions, he is well out of the limelight. During a game, when Ash makes a particularly crunching tackle, he feels a shift. Like a concussion but not a concussion. He shakes it off, finishes the game, and heads home.
It’s only when he runs a stop sign, nearly being crushed beneath a lorry, Ash realizes something is very wrong. He ran the sign because it was blue. But stop signs are red, right? Not in the world Ash now finds himself in. And so it goes on.
Ash discovers he is a subjective locus, a “sub-loc”-a curious term for what he has become. He has the ability to travel between alternate…
