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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Jan 2008, 224 pages
Paperback:
Jan 2009, 224 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Lucia Silva
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An unusual coming-of-age story that examines the fluidity of identity and the ways in which people consciously redefine themselves in the face of love.
In the not too distant future, a one-hundred-year-old man called H sails the eastern coast of England with his godson. H recalls when he himself was sixteen—his godson’s age—as they search for the site of H’s life-altering friendship with a boy named Finn. Finn lives alone on an isolated slip of land and follows no rules: he spends his days swimming, fishing, and collecting driftwood for his tiny beach hut. H, on the other hand, is an upper-class boarding school boy stifled by monotony and endless rules. They meet by chance on the beach, and H is immediately awed by (and jealous of) Finn’s way of life. They strike up an unlikely friendship but the gap between their lives becomes difficult to bridge, and before long the idyll that nurtured their relationship is shattered by heart-wrenching scandal.
Meg Rosoff was formerly a YA author, but her work transcends categorization and we are delighted to bring it to adult readers for the first time. What I Was is a timeless, enthralling story destined to become a classic.
ONE
Rule number one: Trust no one.
By the time we reached St. Oswald's, fog had completely
smothered the coast. Even this far inland, the mist was impenetrable; our white
headlights merely illuminated the fact that we couldn't see. Hunched over the
wheel, father edged the car forward a few feet at a time. We might have driven
off England and into the sea if not for a boy waving a torch in bored zigzags by
the school entrance.
Father came to a halt in front of the main hall, set the
brake, pulled my bag out of the boot, and turned to me in what he probably
imagined was a soldierly manner. "Well," he said, "this is it."
This is what? I stared at the gloomy Victorian
building and imagined those same words used by fathers sending their sons off
into hopeless battle, up treacherous mountains, across the Russian steppes. They
seemed particularly inappropriate here. All I could see was a depressed
institution of secondary education ...
The treat of the book is Rosoff’s beautiful and mythically charged setting. Her lush prose paints the craggy rocks and crashing sea surrounding Finn’s fairy-tale-like shack and the bone-aching chill of the damp winds with unforgettable detail. However, her stellar prose makes the book all the more disappointing, as it sets the reader up to expect greatness through-and-through. While the three star rating indicates "average", Rosoff's talents are anything but, so if you're a newcomer, start with How I Live Now to experience the full breadth of her fiction...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Lucia Silva).
Useful to Know
If you read
interviews and blogs
about Meg Rosoff you
may find references
to a book called The Dark Ages.
This was the title
that she first gave
to her story about H
and Finn, but which
she later renamed What I Was.
What I Was
was published as
a young adult title
in the UK in summer
2007, but was
positioned as a book
for adults in the USA -
an interesting
situation for an
...
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