The Switch by Anthony Horowitz

The male version of Freaky Friday (almost). Instead of changing places with his father, Tad changes places with a boy who works in a carnival.

But let’s back up. First, Tad lives in a sumptuous mansion with a narcissistic mother and nearly-absent, busy-working father. One day when he was denied the opportunity to take the field trip he wanted, he wished he were someone else. He managed to wish at the exact same, once-in-several-thousands-of-years time that the wishing star shifted orbit… and voila: next morning: he is Bob Snarby.

On the surface, Bob is the anithesis of Tad. He lives in a filthy trailer with verbally abusive parents. He also is recruited by Finn, a nasty bad guy, to break-and-enter homes.

Tad (now Bob), tries to break-and-enter his old home, ends up arrested and then he's farmed out to a charity which was operated by his own father. He finds out that the charity is a front that actually tests his father’s business products (beauty items) on homeless children instead of animals. He also finds out that his father orchestrated a violent genocide against an Indian tribe who refused to sell their jungle plant to him....

It all ends with the death of Finn, the arrest and incarceration of Tad’s parents, via Tad’s own maneuverings, and the potential rehabilitation and friendship of Tad and Bob returned to their own bodily forms.

It’s a pretty shallow and formulaic story by an author who writes a boy-friendly spy series (Alex Rider ). It has medium readability. The violence is the biggest safety-issue. The bad guy, Finn, explains (though not in great detail) how he “wrote” all over a tattoo artist who had mangled his own tatoo with his this man's needles and caused the man to go insane from the torture. He later kills a man via stabbing when he breaks and enters his home with Bob (who is now Tad). And he dies in the end in a dramatic scene, via being shot by police and then falling off the top of a high roller coaster. Yes, he’s the bad guy, and “lived by the sword; died by the sword,” but this is the equivalent of modern American TV show appealing to flashy and dramatic violence. Blech.

Safety Rating: 1 Vatican Flag