Game Changer

Ash is an American Football player who revels in the intense physicality of the game. As a lineman he ‘does the dirty work and gets no glory’ but his satisfaction comes from the knowledge that it is precisely these two qualities which underpin the success or failure of the team. His tackles are well known both for their legality and for their fearsomeness and they were the reason for the many life-changing events which unfold in the book.
After one of his legendary tackles Ash experiences a feeling ‘like my blood had been replaced with ice water’ and it is this moment which causes a significant shift in the world around him.
Driving a friend home, he jumps a light-because it is blue, not red as he expects it to be-and narrowly avoids what could have been a fatal collision. Afterwards, on the periphery of his vision, he sees a skateboarder. These are the dual threads which underpin the ensuing storyline.Ash has become the centre of the universe. Each of his tackles bumps the world into another reality and the skateboarder multiplies each time. Their job is to guide Ash through the shifting dimensions until, with luck and their training, a better world will be achieved.
The skateboarders explain the rational with dialogue which is often obtuse, and, as the changes to Ash’s world continue, the story becomes the province of skilled readers. The premise of the story is an interesting one, ripe with possibilities, but the speed of the world shifts the subsequent changes make it an almost whistle-stop tour of society’s problems. In the course of the book Shusterman raises racism, violence to women, disability, homosexuality, drug dependency and gender stereotypes. After one change Ash becomes a girl, after another he is a young man from a wealthy family who is dealing drugs, in another he is gay. This hectic pace of change does not allow a serious examination of any of these problems-instead, an awareness that the narrator is a white, middle-class male makes this cultural toe-dipping seem even more hollow.
Game Changer unfolds around a clever idea but ultimately skims across too many possible concepts and fails to convince.