This seems like an unusual take on a dystopian novel Time has been stopped for nearly a year. Truda and her family live in a house with a switch that no one ever touches, that her father protects by nailing it into many bigger and bigger boxes. Truda can leave her box to go to school, her brother Richard can't leave his box at all. Truda can hear him in there, skipping rope and practicing Portuguese. The adults of the world are frantically pushing teens to work on solutions to the issue of the stopped time. They're approaching it as a school project. The writing style is also unusual - it seems to writing as part narrative, part list, part song, part mathematical equations and part anything goes. I thought it was a very creative start to the novel in terms of concept and style.