What I Was

Meg Rosoff's, "What I was" is an intriguing novel about the reflections of H, and his obsession with Finn, a young boy who lives by the sea. It is a novel about the weird way friendships form, and the obsession that they can sometimes cause. After seveal educational disasters, H is sent to St. Oswald's, boarding school, where there are many great expectations from him. H meets Finn, a beautiful and also facinating boy who lives alone by the sea. "What I was" is a story about how they form a friendship, against all the odds of comformity and reason. Rosoff's novel is illuminated by the voice of H, and his reflections about the past, his immaturity, and his search for a friendship that can some how give him the connectiont hat he has long lacked. He finds his connection within Finn, but is his human connection and friendship based on truth or deception. Rosoff, definitely captures the emotions or honesty, infatuation, devotion, obsession, and confusion, that come with first romances and the questions that arise when it happens. As the reader, we get to decide whether H was purely in love or if he was just envious or even jealous of the life of Finn, because it didn't even remotely compare to H's routine based life. When I first read it, I loved it and could not put the novel down. Rosoff uses much imagery to make each page of the novel vivid, as if the book was being played out in your mind right then and there. The novel is filled with many twists and turns, and the ending was a complete shocker for myself, that I had to read it several times to make sure I was understanding it correctly. I definitely recommond this book and recommend it for English teachers, teaching Young Adult literature, because certainly this novel can be put under this catagory.

What I Was was my first introduction to Meg Rosoff and I am hooked. The book begins with a troubled teen being shuffled off to the last in a series of failed boarding school attempts - St. Oswald's. We come to find out his troubles stem from the awkwardness, isolation and insecurity of adolescence. These are not unique struggles for any adolescent; however, Rosoff writes through the eyes of the narrator with a vulnerability and visceral sense of personal torture that the experience engenders empathy and a clear path for relatedness. Hilary, the narrator, needs to go through the typical hazing and cruel brutality of potentially more secure yet unfailingly insensitive roommates. It is when he meets Finn, an orphan around his age, living alone in a hut on the beach near St. Oswald's that the story turns and a glimmer of hope and excitement presents itself to Hilary. His relationship with Finn is what enables the reader to realize the narrator's true feelings, deepest insecurities and humanity. Finn takes the novel in a wonderfully refreshing direction - a DIY, Robinson Crusoe adventure that intrigues, attracts and makes you fall in love just as Hilary does. Finn represents an alternate universe into which Hilary can escape and allows himself to feel humiliation, rejection, heartache and jealousy - and keep coming back for more. The reader gets to decide if Hilary is in love with Finn in a romantic way reveling in the intimacy of laying side by side in the close quarters of a cave for hours...or if his love was really envy of a life so much more extraordinary than his own and a boy so much more adept at maneuvering through life than himself - without the parental, social, educational...life misgivings. My only contention with this novel is that it ends with the narrator now 100 years old looking back, reflecting on his youth and I wanted to remain in the pain, awkwardness and drama of first love and self-sustainability a little longer. It was a complete page-turner with a shocking twist that sucks you in and leaves you wanting more.

This book popped into my head several months after having finished it. I then had to search awhile to remember the name. It is worth it! I listened to it on audio and enjoyed both the narration and the novel itself. Good, touching read.

Imagine that Harry Potter never found out he was a wizard, that he continued to live a pathetic little life of no consequence in a drab corner of England where nobody really cares about much beyond keeping up appearances. Then you would have some idea of the main character of Rosoff's outstanding novel. He gets dumped by his family in a charmless school for boys, the kind of place that would still have him after failing to measure up in previous institutions. By luck he happens to meet the enigmatic Finn, who lives alone in a shack on the shore near the school. For reasons he doesn't fully understand (mostly because he's never felt this way before), the story's protagonist is enamored of Finn, the way he lives, everything about him. Finn becomes everything he wishes himself to be but isn't. Jeopardizing his standing at the school (and perhaps being expelled from the last school to have him), he does all he can to spend time with Finn, even to the point of smothering Finn with his own needs. The novel ends with a surprising twist that will make you want to re-read the whole book just to see how it all comes together. This story is wonderful in it's own right. That Rosoff, being a woman from America, has created a completely convincing teenaged English boy character makes it just that much more so. A great book!

Definitely the best of the Meg Rosoff novels, this story looks back at life in a miserable boarding school on the English coast in the 1960s, and a boy discovering love in an unexpected relationship. It is written with Rosoff's usual subtlety, insight and humour. A beautiful, evocative novel.