In Review

03 December 2008 21:45 BST

What I Was by Meg Rosoff

Published by Penguin, out August 7, 199pp, £6.99.

In a nutshell…

Dark, gripping, coming-of-age love story

What's it all about?

An old man is swept back on a tide of memory to 1962, 'the year I discovered love', to relive his time as a 16-year-old boarder on the crumbling East Anglia coast. Stumbling past a battered wooden shack on one of many enforced cross-country runs, he encounters Finn: enigmatic, beautiful, and completely self-sufficient. The narrator is utterly enthralled by Finn, drawn to his very being, and following, blindly, to the very brink of his precarious world.

Who's it by?

American born Meg Rosoff burst onto the literary scene in 2004 with one of the most highly acclaimed debut novels for children and adults in recent years, How Llive Now, which won three awards. Her second novel, Just in Case won the 2007 Carnegie Medal. Before this amazingly successful literary career took off, Rosoff had various jobs in advertising and publishing, and even spent a year at a London art school. Rosoff says of her decision to start writing: "After 15 years in advertising, my youngest sister died of breast cancer, and I thought if I was going to write a book, I'd better do it soon, because life is short. So I did."

This is her third novel.

As an example…

2It was cold. My clothes were clammy with sweat and I shivered. There was nothing for it but to stand up, hold my breath and rap on the door. Once. Twice. Nothing. And then suddenly he was there, not inside the hut but appearing from the dunes beyond, eyes clear, walk graceful, smiling a little as if he might actually be glad to see me."

Likelihood of becoming a Hollywood Blockbuster

While the quality of Rosoff's vivid descriptions are almost cinematic in themselves, the haunting lyricism of the fragile East Anglia coast and its brooding characters are just too fragile for the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. The back-to-nature setting and pent-up emotions of the two main characters might evoke those more ponderous, Brokeback Mountain-style blockbusters – but even less actually happens. It is what is left unspoken, and undone that gives the novel its power – which doesn't translate well to the big screen. So – more arthouse than Hollywood, but even then it would be a difficult and unwelcome transition.

What the others say

"Another coming-of-age novel which sucks the reader into its universe." – Time Out

"The author writes beautifully, drawing the reader in with slow, languid prose." – Bookheads

"A melancholy book, suffused with an awareness of time lost." – The Times

So is it any good?

Like all the best teen novels, the haunting love story of What I Was speaks powerfully to both adults and children. This supremely beautiful novel seeks to explore that ever elusive emotion – love itself – by testing its ability to overcome all barriers.

The lyrical nature of Rosoff's prose lingers in the mind long after the book has been put down, and this, combined with a good old-fashioned mystery, pulls the reader along with that same irresistible tug Finn exerts on our narrator. The prose itself seems to mirror the very coastline it describes, as waves of beautiful, spare emotion crash in and out of the narrative to enthral, and at times completely overwhelm, the reader.

The novel's central plot twist did leave me somewhat disappointed, as it threatens to tie the novel up in too neat a bow and explain away its integral complications. However, Rosoff expertly manages the outcomes of this rather spectacular narrative device, so as to avoid forcing the reader into any shoe-horned conclusions and ultimately preserves the beautiful, fragile ambiguity of the novel's themes.

So – if you want teenage fiction that combines beautiful, poetic prose with a weighty subject matter sure to provoke discussion long after the last page has been turned, look no further than Meg Rosoff's What I Was.

9/10

Ashley Cook