One December night, 14-year-old Alex goes to bed. He wakes up to find himself in the wrong bedroom, in an unfamiliar house, in a different part of the country, and it’s the middle of June. Six months have disappeared overnight. The family at the breakfast table are total strangers.

And when he looks in the mirror, another boy’s face stares back at him. A boy named Flip. Unless Alex finds out what’s happened and how to get back to his own life, he may be trapped forever inside a body that belongs to someone else.

Questions of identity, the will to survive, and what you’re willing to sacrifice to be alive make this extraordinary book impossible to put down.

Alex, a 14 years old ordinary teenager, sees his life been taken away when he wakes up and realizes that’s not his own body. Now he’s Philip—as known as just Flip—, but he has no idea how to talk or act like him. Flip plays sports, Alex plays a clarinet and chess. Flip is popular and Alex is more the nerd kind of boy. And Flip has a girlfriend—well, two—, while Alex has never even kissed a girl.

But, most of all, Alex needs to find out how he ends up trapped inside Flip’s body, where is Flip, and where is his own body. With internet and cellphones, it doesn’t take him too long to find out the truth—a scary and cruel one.

I couldn’t put this book down. I started reading it on the day I got it from Book it Forward Tours, and soon I was done reading it. It’s an emotional roller coaster, we see Alex struggling with his own problems—and dealing with Flip’s problems as well—, and it’s tough when he finds out what happened to him. He questions a lot what’s the soul, why that happened to him and how he can deal—or not—with his new reality. I kinda saw the ending coming, but the way Bedford wrote it is breathtaking!

Author: Martyn Bedford
Country: United States
Language: English
Genre: Young Adult
Publisher: Wendy Lamb Books
Publication date: April 5, 2011
Pages: 272
Purchase:

Rating:

My favorite quotes on this book are bellow.

Dad reckoned there was a rational explanation for everything, even things that made no sente at all. UFOs, ghosts, God—they’re just the names people have come up with for stuff they haven’t worked out yet.

How could anyone help him? Never mind hours, he might be stuck like this for days, weeks, months, years.
Forever.

“Philip, how come you’re not horrible to me these days? Actually, you’re even nice to me.”
“Sorry,” he said, deadpan, “but the voices in my head are telling me to like you.”
If she’d looked at him strangely before, it was nothing compared to her expression now. “You said something… funny? And… clever? No, no, nooo.” She shook her head. “The mouth says ‘Smile’ but the brain says, ‘Be afraid, Teri, be very afraid.’”

Did you need to like a girl to go out with her? Did you need to have anything in common? Or was it enough just to fancy her?

“Ice-skating injury,” Alex said. “You should see my bum.”
“Oh, thanks, but usually I like to get to know someone a bit better first, yeah?”

Hey, Alex, when you’ve already died once and lived to tell the tale, you get a bit reckless about things like drink-driving.

“D’you make a habit of this?” she said, half hiding a smile. “Luring girls to secluded spot, then talking about murder?”

“I’ve been thinking,” Alex said.
“Oh, now, that’s always a mistake.”

“Why do you hate them so much?” Alex asked after a moment.
The question seemed to release Rob’s tension. “I don’t,” he said quietly. “I hate what I’ve become to them.”

As much as he was crying for Beagle, he was crying for himself.

He shrugged. “I like her; that’s all.”
“But she’s smart,” Teri said. “She’s interesting. She’s funny.”
“I know.”

“Knowing you can do it,” Rob said, “isn’t the same as knowing how.”