The premise of Trading Faces is simple: switch bodies with billionaires, then use their fortunes to save the world. The team charged with inhabiting these four billionaire bodies seems well-equipped to navigate the lives of the rich and famous for the greater good.

Each member holds strengths and weaknesses which both contribute to their special ability and detract from its effectiveness, making these disparate personalities a showcase of flawed good intentions and compromised missions.

The power of M. Carroll’s premise and plot lies in its contrast between these misfits and how each tackles the unexpected challenges that hit them in their most vulnerable places.

From the volatile foster kid Megan O’Neill, whose ability to survive impossible systems leads her to challenge the lifestyle of automobile heiress Grace Browne when she switches places with her, to second in command Jeff Wilson, who trades places with a tech wizard only to find the allure of his knowledge struggles with some of the methods of his mission, Carroll creates an engaging story. Events are delivered with succinct, engrossing philosophical and psychological inspection about the entire process of assuming another identity and living its life:

The scruffy little dog—that was actually a mouse—was always hungry. The mouse, that had been a dog, had escaped. Jeff worried it would be eaten by a cat. Strange fate to be a dog who normally chases cats, and then to find yourself in the body of a mouse and the cat is chasing you!

Each transfer leads its participant into new territory containing revelations about the life of the rich and famous. Each involves revised decisions and difficult choices that somehow come to rest on the shoulders of what each personality finds to be the most challenging about their own lives and approaches.

Librarians seeking a powerhouse introduction to the first book in the The Billionaire Switch series will find Trading Faces especially highly recommendable thanks to its deeper attention to not just the transfer process, but the dilemmas which arise from living a very different life.

Between its moral and ethical examinations and its vivid action-packed confrontations with self and others, Trading Faces: The Billionaire Switch is an engrossing story that’s highly recommendable to book clubs interested in thought-provoking tales of not just envisioning very different lives, but actually living and changing them. — D. Donovan, Sr. Reviewer, Midwest Book Review