This is a book all about changes. How your life changes with everything you do. Whether you wear the blue shirt today or you choose green instead, different things will happen. But then again, your choices not only change your life, but the world around you too.

This story focuses on Ash, a high school football player who, after one tough hit on the football field, finds himself in a parallel universe. Sure, he's still Ash, but everything around him is different: his school mascot, the colors for the NFL teams, and many other things don't seem quite right. For the rest of the story, Ash must navigate through different parallel universes in order to try to make it back home. Remember the show Quantum Leap? It's a little like that, except that he's always Ash and always in the same year. But like that show, Ash must navigate big issues like racism and segregation, dating violence and drugs.

Some white cishet teen boys think they are the center of the universe, but it takes this actually happening before Ash Bowman gains some perspective. While playing football, an impressive tackle takes him into a place where his choices change the world, sometimes in subtle ways and sometimes more drastically. A still-segregated world helps him finally understand his black best friend better, and there are worlds where he's gay, and even a girl.
It's a huge amount to take on in one book, but the focus on racism carries all the way through, and it touches on mental health, emotional abuse, unfair pocket sizes, outing of others, and most of all -- empathy. Recommend.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a DRC of this title for review. All opinions are my own.

Actual rating: 3.5 stars

OK, this book was pretty good, but my low(ish) rating is due to the fact that I just don't think this will have the mass appeal of some of his other books. This is a deeply metaphorical look at mutliverses and multidimensions (is there another you out there somewhere living a somewhat parallel life?) while also taking on huge contemporary issues of civil rights and LGBTQ+ awareness and acceptance. While I appreciated this book and the various ideas it left me with, I don't know if the readers Shusterman currently has will all be as invested.

Ash Bowman is a lineman. He isn't someone who seeks out attention, and he doesn't need to have a lot of accolades. So when a huge hit in a football game sends him spinning, he doesn't do much besides what he always does: walks it off. And on the way home, when he realizes that stop signs are blue and not red, he wonders if it's just a fluke. Then, in the next week's game, when he has another huge hit and begins to realize that when he slides into an Elsewhere, the world shifts. And every shift takes him further and further away from his original world. Can he make his way back? Does he want to?

Overall, this is a second purchase book suited for large collections.

Ever since I finished the Arc of the Scythe series, I had been hesitant to pick up anything else by Neal Shusterman. But, I was not at all sorry I read Game Changer. I could not put this down! I wanted my kids to leave me alone so I could finish it. Shusterman is so good at presenting current issues inside a fiction story: he leaves readers questioning everything they know. Thank goodness he has never slipped into another dimension. I can't wait for this book to come out so I can recommend it to other readers!

Thanks to #NetGalley for providing an advance reading copy of #GameChanger by Neal Shusterman.

Neal Shusterman has become one of my go to authors! I know I can always count on him to provide a great story that is both layered, nuanced, and bound to make you think and reflect! As Shusterman says in his author note, "I wish you an opening, thought-provoking, nail-biting, occasionally troubling but ultimately satisfying read! Game Changer is a story for now inspired by all that 2019-2020 has so far managed to evoke from the pandemic to social injustice in all of its myriad forms such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and privilege.

Ash is a high school football player. He's a regular high school guy in many respects going along with the flow hoping his football prowess will attract at least some attention from college scouts. Life is imperfect but not too bad. He has football, a best friend, a place among his football teammates, and he's a mostly decent human being. He's thoughtful but not too introspective. He recognizes that there are problems in the world but thinks they don't really impact him per se or feel too big for one person to do anything about.

That all changes one night on the gridiron when he makes a hard tackle and has more than the lights knocked out of him. Suddenly Ash is cosmically catapulted into the multiverse and experiences parallel lives of himself in many iterations guided by otherworldly skateboarders.

Initially it feels a bit like a Freaky Friday/Marty McFly from Back to the Future mashup in which Ash finds himself in a somewhat pleasant world with improved financial circumstances. But of course, these aren't the only changes. Ash has to confront each change and understand its implications for himself and, more direly, the very future of humanity. As the sub-loc (subjective locus) his life is a microcosm of the world, rife with injustices big and small, all snatched out of the headlines. "An epidemic of ignorance." Each subsequent big hit creates a new iteration and each one increasingly becomes a desperate race to right the wrongs, wrongs he creates or perpetuates, before it's too late. "...all the things that never happened, all the choices never made, and all the random possibilities that fizzled away become possible again. It's actually pretty exciting."

Shusterman forces Ash to walk the walk and talk the talk as he experiences firsthand all the ways in which injustice impacts a life. "But he saw people who thought giving a thumbs-up to protesters was the full extent of their civic responsibility--as if acknowledging that Black lives mattered was all it took to clear their consciences. And later, when the news chose to focus on scenes of mayhem, and fires raging in every major city, I remember thinking, Is this what Leo wants? As if there weren't a million choices between honking your horn and burning it all tot he ground."

"There are a great many things I don't understand. I'm sure it's the same for you. No matter how smart we think we are, we simply can't know all there is to know--and if you spend all your time thinking about those things, it will drive you crazy. Mostly, we're okay with the things we don't get.
we shrug our shoulders, accept the mystery, and move on. But not everyone's like that. there are some people who are so threatened by things they don't understand that they feel a need to stomp them out. They have to crush them so that each thing killed is one less thing to tax their brain.
It's the force behind war, behind genocide, behind the worst things that humans are capable of...It's also the cause of the small injustices we come across every single day."

Shusterman clearly has a lot on his mind after all that's happened in the past year, nay six months. And he had some time to write and write he did. Here's the thing. It's rushed. (*note he says in the author note that he's been working on this for four years.) And Ash's metamorphosis strains credulity but only because the very deep thoughts and later, quantum philosophical understanding, seem out of character for a pretty average (fairly oblivious, white, heterosexual) 17 year old boy. Even so, Shusterman can out-think and out-write just about anyone, even in a hurry. He creates a story that is a sure reflection of this time in history even if the story itself doesn't quite deliver the same storytelling arc of his other novels. Ash experiences a lifetime of perspectives that change him for the better, something we could all use! "To 'not exist' is one thing--but to be outside the possibility of existing is far worse. It's no surprise you feel the desire of all the things that will never be. You're a pinprick of light in a place that's forgotten the very concept of illumination."

"Don't hide from it," said Ed. "Experience it. Experiencing your lives is the most important thing you can do."

#netgalley #gamechanger

Full disclosure: #NealShusterman is one of my favorite authors of all time, so I have been looking forward to #GameChanger, and it did NOT disappoint. The book follows Ash, a high school football player who--every time he gets hit--finds himself transported into other universe or timeline where there is always something different from the one before. As this is an advanced release, I will not give away any spoilers. However, like all Shusterman novels, and what makes him so great, is that he takes a thread of modern truth or social criticism and sees it through to a logical conclusion. "OK, if this is true, then what if..." This book covers topics such as racism, socioeconomic bias, white privilege, gender issues, sexuality, abuse, morality, and more--all while asking the reader to also investigate their beliefs on each topic. This is not one to miss. Many thanks to the publishers and #NetGalley for the advanced copy.