Hosted by Jay @ Bibliophilopolis
“Switch” by Lucy Taylor
Card picked: Ten of Clubs
From: David Copperfield’s Tales of the Impossible
Review: After a night of chinook winds batter her home, teenager Erika wakes to her neighborhood scrambled. The man and woman who say that they’re her parents think she’s a girl named Lizbeth. The friendly neighborhood dog doesn’t know her at all. Her kind grandmother is speaking a completely different language and beats Erika in the shins with her cane. The only person who recognizes her is Mrs. Markson who believes that God has cheated her out of the Rapture and is driving the beloved convertible that belongs to Erika’s molester uncle. And does this have anything to do with Erika’s own dreams of being someone else?
Although fairly widely published, I’m not at all familiar with Lucy Taylor’s work. Her writing is quite good, but this story didn’t work for me. The first section of the story warns that Erika is trapped in a dream, but that sort of ruined my situational empathy. Should I care about all the wackiness when it’s the content of a dream? (This from someone who used dreams extensively in the first novel she wrote… I never said I wasn’t a hypocrite.)
Simple Tricks & Nonsense 
Still sounds like a pretty interesting premise for a story — even with the dream!
Yeah, it seems like the kind of story that would be more interesting if the reader didn’t know whether it was a dream or not.