Published 7 September 2009
Published as Sophomore Switch in US
Take an administrative snafu, a bad breakup, and what shall heretofore be known as "The Hot-Tub Incident," and you’ve got two unprepared sophomores on a semester abroad. For American party girl Tasha, an escape to Oxford may be a chance to ditch her fame as a tabloid temptress, but wading Uggs-deep in feminist theory is not her idea of a break. Meanwhile, the British half of the exchange, studious Emily, nurses an aching heart amid the bikinis and beer pong of U.C. Santa Barbara. Soon desperation has the girls texting each other tips — on fitting in, finding love, and figuring out who they really are. With an anthropologist’s eye for detail and a true ear for teen-speak, exciting new novelist Abby McDonald has crafted a funny, fast-paced, poignant look at survival, sisterhood, and the surprising ways we discover our true selves.
It may just be me, but I love reading books that are in some way set in my home country. It makes me feel all warm and squishy inside, I love to read about places I know about, places i've visited or just read someone describe where I live with precision and accuracy. So, when I first read about Life Swap, I knew I had to read it. The narrative is spilt between our two protagonists, Emily and Tasha, whose are nothing alike. Emily hails from the UK, shes quite a straight laced, super organised girl. Whereas Tasha is all American, with the tan and ugg boots to match. She's quite brassy, loud and a full on party girl. They both take a semester at each others college, trying in vain to get away from their lives and the people in them.
For me, I found this book to be quite easy to get into, I wasn't blown away by the plot line or the characters, but I still enjoyed the book nontheless. The characters were very stereotypical, they didn't shy away from the norm of what people perceive them to be like. Emily was very astute, quite boring, lacking in the boyfriend department and had a wardrobe full of tweed trousers and boring outfits. Tasha had short skirts galore and a hankering for getting off with boys at parties. Everything you would expect them to be like from the description. Yes, certian plot lines made them break away from their stereotypes in general, but it wasn't enough for me to really see a difference in the characters. It just seemed like they were the people they turned out to be in the end, at the beginning of the book, they were just chained by circumstance and the people around them to be who they wanted to be. I wanted big revellations, girls really finding themselves, but I didn't really take that away from the book.
The character development was just lacking for me, and some of the sub-plots seemed like they were unecessary. Like the fact that Tasha was a politics student at Oxford and she learned about womens rights and feminism, but it seemed like the authors knowledge of these facts was put on display, when it had little to do with the overall story. It seemed like a unneccesary plot line that drew me away from the book. The storyline was a bit too dis-jointed for my taste. I would recommend this book to people who enjoy girly books.
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