What I Was

This was another disappointment by Meg Rosoff; I don’t know why I’m always so hopeful that the next book will be any better than the previous. This is a coming-of-age YA novel (with the word “bugger/buggery” in every second page, to try to keep it either hip or British) about a boy in a boarding school in the sixties who runs off and meets a boy called Finn who lives on a riverbank by himself. He’s increasingly attracted to Finn and his lifestyle and goes to live there during the holidays. Disaster strikes and (with no great surprise to the discerning reader) Finn turns out to be a girl, and some other boy drowns. I can see the vision Rosoff had, but it really isn’t realised in this book; neither the school, nor the characters, nor the landscape comes across in any genuine way, and at the end of the day it’s because she really isn’t a very good writer.