"What I Was" Meg Rosoff (Penguin, ISBN 9780670018444, $23.95)
Meg Rosoff's tale of friendship and longing takes place in 1962 East Anglia,
where our narrator has been sent to St. Oswald's, a boys' boarding school of
"long history and low standards," after being sent down from two other
schools, having failed to show proper enthusiasm for sport and Empire. The
food is wretched, the dormitories freezing, and soon this particular
sixteen-year-old finds himself drawn to a simple hut on the coast, where a
boy his age called Finn lives alone, what we would today call "off the
grid," fending for himself again sea and storm. Fascinated by Finn's fierce
independence and simple lifestyle, the schoolboy begins to stray from St.
Oswald's, risking dangerous tides to steal hours of kayaking, crab fishing,
and silent communion. The camaraderie that develops is close and quiet, love
without eroticism, set against a backdrop of cliff and ocean.
Rosoff writes lyrically of a landscape haunted by the North Sea, slowly
claiming Finn's beach; the boys' trip to a drowned medieval city and a
denouement set in a climate-changed, drowning England link together
centuries of coastal England's uneasy relationship with the water
surrounding it. The ocean serves as a powerful metaphor for the submerging
of self that comes with first love: the St. Oswald's boy worships Finn, pure
and simple, wants to become him. When Finn falls dangerously ill, the roles
are suddenly reversed, and the novel tumbles to a surprising conclusion.
Review by Anna
Perleberg, May 1, 2008
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