Book Review: “Switched” (Trylle Trilogy, #1) by Amanda Hocking

I read a lot of Young Adult books, especially Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance because I’m the mother of a sixteen-year-old girl. We swap books like nobody’s business, and afterward we talk about them at the dinner table. So, when I heard about this up and coming indie author, Amanda Hocking, and the amazing sales numbers she was achieving, I wanted to see what all the hullabaloo was about.

For those of you who’ve never heard of Amanda Hocking, she’s a young twenty-something who gathered up all the fiction she’d written over the years and decided to self-publish it for all the world to read. Admirable, and as I mentioned above, her numbers have been phenomenal.

Curiosity about this Uber-Indie authoress finally pushed me to check out at least one of her books. If I liked it, I’d pass it on to my daughter to read so we could talk about it at the dinner table before gobbling up more of her books together.

I chose Switched, the first book in the Trylle Trilogy, because it sounded like it was right up our alley. Switched begins at the six-year-old narrator’s birthday party, just moments before her psycho mother tries to stab her with a kitchen knife while screaming, “You’re a monster.” Interesting premise.  Is Wendy really a monster?

Of course she is, but only if you fall into that vein of people who find magical creatures intimidating. Fast-forwarding eleven years, we follow seventeen-year-old Wendy on her journey as she discovers just what kind of monster she is. The answer arrives in the guise of an attractive, but somewhat creepy young man who keeps staring at Wendy and freaking her out.  After learning that she’s a Trylle (troll,) Finn saves Wendy from attack and takes her home to meet her real family for the first time since she was swapped with a human baby at birth.

It’s an intriguing storyline, I will give Ms. Hocking that, but her storytelling skills need a little bit of work. Not only was Switched riddled with an excessive amount of adverbs, I counted at least 8 typos in the manuscript. Is there anything wrong with typos? The occasional “of” instead of “for” happens to even professionally published authors, but I did wonder how thoroughly Ms. Hocking edited her manuscript before she uploaded it for publication. Did she borrow an extra pair of eyes or two, to help her make sure it was not just typo free, but to assist her in making sure the characters and plot were firmly developed? I don’t know, but I do think the manuscript could have been stellar if more time was spent on the editorial side of things.

It is the type of story a sixteen-year-old girl could fall in love with. Wendy’s narrative voice is easy to identify with, and despite being thrust into a strange new world and discovering she’s a troll, many of her concerns fall in line with the worries of a normal teenage girl. Mother-daughter angst and drama, does he think I’m pretty, why can’t I breathe when I’m near him and how can I get my hair to look like a bird nest didn’t fall out of the sky and land on my head…

I haven’t read any of her other books, and at this point in time I have no intention of doing so because life is too short to be weeding through all those adverbs discontentedly. I do think if Amanda Hocking keeps writing and works hand in hand with a good editor, her storytelling skills will smooth out over time and she could be a real force to be reckoned with.

Overall, I give Switched 2.5 out of 5 stars. Interesting plot and characters, but the writing needs a lot of work. If you’re interested in checking out Switched for yourself, it’s available on Amazon and Smashwords as a $.99 download.