Flip

February 21, 2011
Adult novelist Bedford (The Houdini Girl) makes his YA debut with a moving tale that juggles realistic high school fiction with fantasy while deftly avoiding clichés from both genres. Teenage Alex wakes up one day to find that he has no memory of the past six months of his life and is stuck in the body of a teenager named Philip (nicknamed Flip). As he attempts to live his new life, he learns that his actual body is across the country, in a coma, and that there are others who have swapped bodies as well. Alex is torn between the opportunities a life in Flip's body offers—no asthma, gorgeous girlfriends—and the knowledge that this isn't really his life. Bedford does an excellent job of getting into the mind of a teenager, focusing less on the reason behind the switch than on Alex's concerns about how his friends and family (in both bodies) are affected by the situation. A few missteps—Alex's reluctance to avoid researching his own history being the most notable—don't make the story any less engrossing. Ages 14–up.