Customer Reviews

What I Was

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I just read some reviews and will warn you that too many of them will spoil your experience if you read them before the book.

I'm a sucker for nostalgia and this book has it in spades. It's a beautifully written story set in 1960's England. I guess you could consider it a coming-of-age story, but that's a bit too simple.

It just exceeds 200 pages so it's great if you want something to just fill a weekend. The author has been considered a "Young Adults" author until this newest work, and critics are finally saying that her writing is worth a more consideration than that.

Anyway, I would highly recommend the book. Now, I can't wait to go back and read her previous novels.

Publishers and the general reading public are finally getting wise to a truth that those of us who review young adult fiction have known for a long time: some of the best, most profound novels in recent years have been published in the "young adult" category.

Meg Rosoff is one of those novelists who has managed to transcend categorization as a writer solely for young people, and now her newest book, WHAT I WAS, is being published and marketed for an adult audience. Although it does not differ markedly in style or maturity from her earlier work, such as her award-winning post-apocalyptic novel HOW I LIVE NOW, WHAT I WAS should reach a deservedly larger audience thanks to Rosoff's publisher's decision to broaden her readership.

WHAT I WAS begins in the not-too-distant future, as our narrator (who remains nameless for most of the book), now an aged man on the brink of 100, rows along the coast of England with his young godson. Desperately trying to find and identify the landmarks of his youth, the narrator casts his mind back to the time he spent in this area when he was a student at St. Oswald's boarding school in the years after World War II.

As a boy, the narrator was a disastrous student. Asked to leave a series of boarding schools due to "the deplorable nature of my behavior and grades," the narrator's main failing is his inability to successfully navigate the social structures and power struggles that characterize boys' schools such as St. Oswald's. Thanks to the brutal bullying of his roommates and the benign neglect of the schools' authority figures, the narrator, thoroughly miserable, uses every opportunity to escape from the confines of St. Oswald's. It is on one such escape that he makes a discovery that will change his life forever.

The narrator discovers a remote cottage, set apart from the mainland, as it is only reachable during low tide. The cottage is set apart figuratively, too, as it seems to belong to an era of history long before the conflicts and political struggles of the 20th century. The narrator also meets --- and becomes instantly enamored of --- the cabin's sole occupant, a boy of about his own age named Finn. Readers will find themselves asking whether the narrator is obsessed with Finn because he loves him or because he wants to be him and all he represents, set as he is, far apart from the daily torments of St. Oswald's and society in general.

There is a lot to digest in Rosoff's latest novel. Questions of sexuality, friendship, identity and love are raised, as is the question of fate. Most intriguing is its exploration of history. The author intentionally posits Finn as leading a pre-modern existence, a simple way of life analogous to the alluring Dark Ages the narrator studies in school. Contrasting this with the power-hungry, social-climbing, rule-abiding 20th century in which the narrator reluctantly finds himself, Rosoff constructs a sort of allegory of history embodied by two very different young people.

WHAT I WAS is not perfect --- an implicit warning about global warming seems out of place, as does the narrator's callous indifference to the fate of one obnoxious classmate --- but it is provocative. Using a dreamy, elegiac tone that captures an old man's recollection of his youth, Rosoff nevertheless evokes youth's indiscretions and obsessions every bit as capably as she has done in her more typical "young adult" titles. Mature teens will still find much to ponder here. More importantly, adults who see this novel in the general fiction shelves may be inspired to pick up Rosoff's other work and discover what those of us who enjoy young adult literature have known all along.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

In 1962 Hilary, the young narrator of this novel is packed off to St Oswald's boarding school for boys by his parents deep within the inhospitable plains of East Anglia. A school that has a reputation as a veritable hotbed of cultural mediocrity and is notorious for its long history and low standards, there's hope that St. Oswald' will somehow attempt to transform Hilary into a useful member of society.

Still haunted by his "last two educational disasters," Hilary does his best to create an environment where he can feel at ease. Jaded by the petty dealings of his fellow classmates, life at St Oswald's is anything but happy with the young boy considering the school nothing more than a cheap merchant of social status, "content to sell an inflated sense of self-worth to middle-class boys who are ultimately of no particular merit."

Hilary hungers for new experiences far from the bleak halls, the glares of authority and the taunts of his roommates. One afternoon, after stopping for a drink of water while running along the coast, Hilary meets the young Finn, a teenage boy who seems content to live a life like Robinson Crusoe. Self-sufficient and contented, Finn makes his living by hauling boxes at the market and he not only has no parents, but lives alone and doesn't go to school. According to the government, Finn doesn't actually exist.

Living in a small, cozy hut by the edge of the beach, with its floors free of sand, its worn cotton rugs and its crammed bookcases, the place is unassuming, comfortable and intimate, proving to be the perfect safe harbor for Hilary. While Finn's spirit is new and soft, the cottage is warmed by decades of use and almost at once, this eccentric reclusive young boy entrances this reject from St. Oswald's: "It's as though I'd fallen down a rabbit hole into some idealized version of This Boy's Life."

Soon enough, Hilary is becoming ever more obsessed with Finn as he attempts to escape both day and night from the daily rituals of St Oswald's, endeavoring to spend time with his new friend, similarly envious of him and also concerned as Hilary stalks him at the local market, everything he knows about Finn eventually coming to him in fragments, tiny shards to number and label and fit together.

Despite the cold, they walk and fish, lie on the beach and stare at sunlit clouds or stars in the night sky, pulling in the traps, and messing about in boats. Life just seems so idyllic and safe from the strictures of school and adult life. All the time, Hilary seems content to just study Finn the way another boy might study history, determined to memorize his vocabulary, his movements, his clothes, and what he says and does, and mostly what he thought. Most of all he wants to see himself through his eyes to define himself in relation to Finn.

This isn't so much sexual attraction, although there is a great love, but its more a type of vicarious living, the sensation of living inside another person's life. Eventually ignoring the ever-harsher glares of authority and the taunts of his roommates, Hilary becomes more of a risk taker, braving the school's curfew to spend even more time with Finn. The accusations however, begin in whispers with Reese and Barrat and Gibbon.

Particularly, Reese with his psychotic tendencies taking him to places he's rather not go and who "lurks and lingers and buzzes around in Hilary's head," with his sticky friendship and sly questions and the barest suggestions that he knows what is going on. Of course, events eventually come to a disastrous and dreaded climax on the sandy shores of East Anglia as a huge storm tears sown the coast and Finn's hut becomes in danger of being swept into the sea. It is here against the roar of wonder of the ocean that memory, imagination, and reality clash with tragic consequences.

This lovely novel is all about friendship and history and how life can change, for better or for worse, though an event, an idea or the influence of another person. Succumbing to emotions so wonderful and terrible, Finn accepts Hilary's love instinctly, without responsibility or conditions; that's what makes him so special. The final revelation, the surprise twist is indeed unexpected, but it doesn't really change Hilary's reaction to the events of that year even as Hilary freaks out when he discovers Finn, sick with a fever and covered with blood in his own bed.

What I Was is a boy's story with a twist, but the book is also a meditation on history and how we can carry the past with us wherever we go. This story is one of many, or many parts of several different stories, along with the lives that come before us with the huts and houses, the remains of animals and clothing, "the messages of the past left in bones."

Finn and Hilary share a childlike delight in the beauty of the natural world and in the simplicities of daily life and they possess an unshakable integrity that ultimately makes possible their appreciation of nature and of each other. The story's emotional credibility is enhanced by the fact they are both different, yet seem to be drawn together forever even as we watch Hilary drive to recreate what has been destroyed and once shattered by storms and by the passage of life itself. Mike Leonard January 08.

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!

This is an interesting story of contrasts. Hilary is in his fourth school, having been thrown out of three before this, the school really doesn't provide for him. When he comes across Finn, a youth who lives alone on a tidal island this changes his life. Finn doesn't go to school but has learnt as much as is possible with the resources available.

As time goes on the friendship deepens but can they keep their friendship a secret and what are the secrets that both are holding in their hearts?

It's a story of friendship, of finding a place in the world and of assumptions. It's heartwarming and interesting and would bear re-reading well.

WHAT I WAS was an impulse buy off of the $2 table at a Books-A-Million in Roanoke. The back-cover copy pulled me in (which is what back cover copy is supposed to do on trade paperbacks, after all). The book is narrated by H., nearing the end of a long and seemingly fulfilling life. He reflects on the teenage "relationship that has shaped and obsessed him for nearly a century." That relationship was with a "beautiful boy named Finn, who lives alone in a fisherman's hut by the sea. Their friendship deepens, offering H the freedom and human connection that has always eluded him. But all too soon the idyll that nurtured their relationship is shattered by heart-wrenching scandal."

I wish the book were half as interesting as it sounded. I was expecting, because of the boarding-school-by-the-sea setting, a bit more closeted boy-romance. I was expecting, because of the back cover copy, a revelation partway through the book that rocks the characters' world. Instead, what we get is an excellent "inside his head" character study of H and how he is a) obsessed with the free-spirit but not socially adept Finn and b) oblivious to the schoolmate in his own dorm who could be his only friend if H would just stop to think about it. Even from the vantage of his later years, H is brutally honest about his own teenage motivations, how his lust and fear combined to alienate him from everyone except the virtually unknowable Finn. On the mission of creating a very understandable main character, Rosoff succeeds. I won't go so far as to say "this is a British CATCHER IN THE RYE," because I don't think that was Rosoff's intent at all. There's a similarity in feel in that the narrator is caught up completely in his own world and doesn't really understand what's going on around him (or, if he does, he brushes it aside in favor of what he wants us to think is going on around him), but the similarity in feel is about as far as I'm comfortable taking the comparison. (Besides, aren't we all tired of hearing first-person-teen-boy-narrators described as "the next Holden Caulfield?")

The shocking scandal? It comes way too late in the proceedings and is dispatched fairly quickly in favor of a "here's what the rest of my life was like" ending. The events precipitating the scandal are somewhat brutally described, and I give credit to Rosoff for some terrific writing in that section. I can't say I was completely shocked by what transpires in those pages; in retrospect the hints are all there regarding where this will all go, despite the fact that the book never feels like it's headed in any particular direction at all. What I take exception to is the editors who decided to tout "the heart-wrenching scandal" as the core of the book when it really isn't. If it was meant to be the core of the book, I'd think Rosoff would have taken a little more time with it, teased out more details of the years immediately following the breaking of the scandal -- but it's as if Rosoff, and by extension H, loses interest once those key events play out. The breaking of the scandal and its aftermath are almost glossed over.

As a character study, I can recommend the first two thirds of the book, but I have to say I was disappointed in what feels like a complete lack of energy in the final third.

I've been holding on to this one because you have to be ready to sink into a Meg Rosoff book. None of this wishy-washy, "Oh, that might be nice to pick up tonight." You've got to be all in. Ready to let her work her magic. Interestingly, WHAT I WAS was first released in Britain as a YA title, then later in the U.S. by Viking Adult. Not sure why the switch but, as is the case with both her previous novels, I think What I Was will appeal equally to adults and young adults. I, naturally, couldn't put it down.

The narrator of this brief, haunting tale remains nameless for the majority of the book. All we know is the year is 1962, the place is England, and the main character is a young man who, having been expelled from two previous boarding schools, is being rather unceremoniously dropped off on the doorstep of his third. Unremarkable in almost every way, the only striking thing about him appears to be his supreme disdain for, well, most everything, a sort of monumental apathy he seems to have absorbed over sixteen years of uninspiring schools, uncaring teachers, and uninvolved parents.

The entire story is told by our narrator as he looks back on his life from the self-declared "impossible age" of 100. This device lends the boy of 16's narrative a certain degree of clarity and wisdom it would otherwise have lacked being told in the present tense. For instance the scene where his father drops him off:

"It's time you sorted yourself out," he said. "You're nearly a man." But a less true description could scarcely have been uttered. I was barely managing to get by as a boy."

Lines like these combine the hindsight of the adult with the aching uncertainty that is adolescence, the knowledge that one is going about the whole thing "wrong," without an inkling of what "right" should or would look like. So much of this novel is taken up by the notion of how we perceive things (particularly in our youth) and how those perceptions can be so real, they utterly subsume reality as it may be or as others may see it. And how those perceptions change us, marking our lives permanently. I don't want to go into any more detail than this, but suffice it to say our young man meets someone who changes his life, in both healthy and unhealthy ways, I would say. And, though neither of their lives end up as they thought they would, the change is what matters. As he puts it:

"It was love, of course, though I didn't know it then [...] At last I extinguished the lamp, though according to my watch it was still early. And then, divided from the night by nothing more than four flimsy walls and an idea of a friend, I fell asleep."

It's a quiet, beautiful, strange book and I loved it.

Anyone who has ever experienced a longing to escape their life, to escape society, to change their life into something free and wild, will find something wonderful in this book. Rosoff has captured that sense of longing so realiztically it felt like she had read my mind.
When H discovers Finn living in an abandoned, sinking fishing village, he becomes obsessed. Maybe with the boy, maybe with his life, maybe with his freedom, his comfort in his own skin, in who he is, and his complete lack of need to become part of society. What does H decide to do when Finn shows very little interest in befriending him? He stalks him. He follows Finn everywhere, and eventually, like the cat that Finn lives with, Finn allows this boy into his life without ever giving any sign of needing or wanting him around. That's enough for H, who is so desperate to escape his life that just the fact that Finn doesn't send him away when he sneaks away from his boarding school to visit, that he is happy with that. Eventually Finn does develop a bit of a friendship with the boy, until by the end Finn is showing H how to crab, navigate a kayak, etc, al the while laughing at H's attempts which are not anything close to the natural skills Finn has.
H adores Finn. Finn is everything H is not. H is impressed by Finn's abilities, knowledge, freedom, and is also very taken with Finn's beauty, even as we wonder what this says about H - is H falling in love with this boy?
I read this book quickly as I could not put it down. I was saddened by the fact that after reading the ending I know I cannot read it again with the same wonderment I read it with the first time. Not because the ending is awful, but only because the ending changes everything you have just read and you can't go back to that wonderful fantasy. But this book moved me and maybe someday when I have forgotten the ending (as if that would happen), I will again be able to enter H's world and empathize with his longing, his confusion, his adoration and desire to be not only with this boy but to BE this boy Finn.
I am 44 years old. This is not only a book for young adults.

The story is about a very special friendship between two fairly different teenagers. One of them has to stay in a boarding school, the other one lives an independent, seemingly adventurous life in a hut on the beach. They share as much time together as possible, until... - Well, you better find out for yourself.

In my opinion it is a lovely book, easy to read, compelling until the very end. Mrs Rosoff is a superb observer of the kind of problems adolescents meet, the way they think, the way they solve problems.

I won't spoil it by practically rewriting the book like so many people do. Seriously, don't read those.

I will say, however, that the ending was what made this book into the amazing piece of art it is. Don't get me wrong, the whole thing is beautifully written, full of evocative language and details that really take you there. But the ending...well, the ending made me cry. I hated the ending, personally, but I also loved it. If it had ended any differently, then What I Was wouldn't be the work of art that I've already described it as. It was so poignant, so beautiful, and so utterly painful, that it just made sense. I don't know how to really describe it without giving away the ending, so you should definitely read it for yourself.

Definitely a book I'll be giving to my children one day.