YA: Your Athenaeum

Currently on the New YA Bookshelf is the body-swapping scifi debut from Lissa Price, Starters. From the LA Times:

In this clever and creepy tale with faint echoes of “The Stepford Wives” and “The Hunger Games,” 16-year-old Callie Woodland is desperate. She and her 7-year-old brother, Tyler, along with quasi-love interest Michael, have been squatting in a vacant apartment building, having lost their parents a year earlier to the Spore Wars. The genocide spores killed everyone between ages 20 and 60, leaving only the very young and very old to coexist. Callie’s brother is ill, but she doesn’t have the funds to take care of him, so she does what many teens with strong family values would do. She investigates ways to provide.

Unfortunately, there aren’t that many options in a dystopian society with such lopsided wealth. Teens have been forbidden from work and are so poor they’re forced to steal, whereas the so-called Enders, most of whom are more than 100, have guaranteed employment, live in mansions and indulge in plastic surgery. For Callie, the best option to help her family is Prime Destinations in Beverly Hills — a body bank that pairs moneyed Enders with good-looking teens who are willing to rent their bodies by the day, week or month. Callie could earn enough money to buy a house and feed her family for a year simply by renting her body three times…

The rentals have no idea what’s happening to their bodies, which are being controlled via neurochip by the Enders, whose bodies are on life support at Prime Destinations and whose brains control the action. Callie’s chip, however, is defective. Callie is supposed to wake up at Prime Destinations only at the end of a monthlong rental. Instead, she wakes up in a nightclub where she can hear the voice of her renter, and the two wrestle for control of Callie’s mind and body… The only thing better than a terrific concept is one that is as well executed as “Starters.”