27 February 2011 FLIP by Martyn Bedford, Wendy Lamb Books, April 2011, 272p., ISBN: 978-0-385-7399-0

"I guess I should have stayed in bed, my pillow wrapped around my head
Instead of waking up to find a nightmare of a different kind..."
-- Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, "This Just Doesn't Seem to Be My Day"

"Alex stood perfectly still in the middle of the car park.  He had been holding his breath, he realized; he exhaled, releasing the air from his lungs in a ragged sob.
"Shutting the phone off, he clenched it in his fist as though he was ready to fling it as far away as he could or as though he'd like to crush it to pieces.  When, at last, he moved, he found he had no direction in mind and simply headed pointlessly towards the school entrance before circling back on himself.
"'Mum,' he said under his breath.  Then louder: 'Mum-mummum.
"Crying so hard by now that it was more snot than tears.  Only then did he notice her: a curly-haired girl, sitting on a wall ten meters away with a book open on her lap and what looked like a cello case propped beside her.  Watching him.'"

The last thing that fourteen year-old Alex Gray recalls is rushing home late in the evening from his buddy David's house.  He awakens to the voice of someone trying to get him up and moving for breakfast and school.  The problem is that Alex does not know the woman who is yelling at him to get a move on; does not know the house in which he has awoken, nor the caustic Goth teenage girl who is parked at the breakfast table in this strange house.  A look in the mirror lets Alex Gray know that he also no longer knows himself.

Alex has awoken inside the body of Philip Garamond, known to everyone as Flip.  He is soon to discover that six months have passed since what he knows as "last night," and that he is now hours away from where he lives...err...lived.

Imagine trying to persuade your family and friends that you aren't really you.  Claim that you don't know them.  Act like that you don't know your way to school, nor what classes you have, what rooms they are in, what teachers you have.  To everyone else -- except for the family dog, who knows something is not right -- you are acting like a wiseass.  The coach is totally pissed because you -- a team star -- are acting like you've never before played the game.  Your girlfriends are furious about the way you are ignoring them, and your buddies don't know what to make of you. 
They all look and see you -- Flip.  Philip Garamond.

What makes me Me?

"The more he analyzed the dreams, the less sense they made.  Of course, dreams hardly ever make sense.  In fact, dreams didn't really exist, as such; they were a product of the mind.  Like a movie -- just beams of light on a screen; switch off the projector and the images were gone.  Dreams were like the mind itself, in a way: nothing to get hold of, to weigh, to measure, to record.  You knew you dreamed, you knew you had consciousness, but only because your mind said so.  To look at it like that, the mind was a product of the mind."

In Alex's search for what has happened to himself and how he's ended up trapped in someone else's body and life, he finds an online discussion board for those in his situation and thereby comes to meet Rob, who claims to also be a psychic evacuee -- the term for someone in these circumstances.  And so it is Rob and that curly-haired girl (who doesn't know what is going on but who sees the positive un-Flip-like behavior in her schoolmate) who provide a bit of support as Alex wrestles over whether he is meant to accept his new life or whether he should try to find his way back home.

Sure, it's clever to quip that FLIP is a mind-blowing read.  But it very much is.   Richie Partington, MLIS
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