The Exchange - Graham Joyce

Title: The Exchange
Author: Graham Joyce
Series: None
Genre: Young Adult Fantasy
Edition: Hardback
256 pages
Price: $11.55 ($13.59 at Barnes & Noble)
Published: July 2008

I hate to start off this way, but - a big disappointment. I picked this one up a couple of times at Barnes & Noble (the only bookstore in my town) and put it back. One of the reasons I would put it back is that it was not available in paperback. And $12.00 for something I was pretty iffy about didn't seem like a good idea. But the premise sounded interesting and I liked the cover picture. (Boy, the "don't judge a book by its cover," sure came back to bite me this time.) Does anyone else think she looks just like Kristin Stewart? No? Just me, huh? Okey dokey then.

The product description called it "A taut (does this mean terse?), otherworldly (maybe) thriller (no) set in contemporary England (okay, this one I can agree with)."

Caz and her best friend Lucy break into strangers’ homes in the middle of the night—not to steal anything, just for the rush. They sneak up on the resident and get nose to nose with them for 15 seconds. Caz (which is short for Catherine by the way) gets caught doing this by one of her elderly neighbors. The old woman snaps a silver bracelet around Caz's wrist. She can’t remove it no matter what she does; The next morning the bracelet seems to have melted into her skin and looks like a tattoo. In addition to the unwanted tattoo that glows and fades in and out, she begins to have a kind of ESP. She can sense other people’s inner lives.

At issue... It is just not interesting. It sounded like it should have been, but I didn't feel the characters or what they were going through. It was a decent script but poorly acted and over-edited. I wondered if it was just me. When looking at Amazon, no one had reviewed the book yet. I found hardly any mention of it when Googling it. Nothing on the author's website. I finally found it originally published in England in 2006 under the name, "Do the Creepy Thing." At Borders.uk it had one review with 4 stars. Since it was only one review I am not going to worry about it being different from my own. No reviews or ratings given at Barnes and Noble or Borders.