What I Was
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
'I was at boarding school in East Anglia, my third. I didn’t want to be there. But if there had been no school, there would be no Finn. He lived in a hut on the coast. He was like the hut, in fact – it took a while for both of them to warm up. But that is all I longed for. Finn, warming to me. A nod. Half a smile. Asking me to help on the boat. Not asking me to leave. I didn’t want it to end. Now I am waiting for the end, and looking back to the beginning.'
Haunting, intense and with a surprising twist in the tale – What I Was is unlike anything you will have read before . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former YA author Rosoff delivers an affecting buddy story about two adolescent boys in 1960s Britain. An unnamed man recounts his time as a disgruntled student at St. Oswald's boarding school; upon ditching an outdoor physical education class jog, he stumbles upon a mysterious fellow teen named Finn who lives alone and off the grid in a hut by the sea. The protagonist, enraptured by his newfound friend, makes it his business to spend as much time as possible with Finn, a major challenge considering school curfews and that the hut can only be accessed during low tide. Weeks go by and Finn falls ill, setting the stage for a surprising revelation that will dramatically transform both boys. Rosoff's unconventional coming-of-age tale is elegantly crafted, though some readers might be turned off by the narrator's unrelenting cynicism (particularly in his handling of another Oswald schoolboy), and the warning shots the narrator fires off about global warming are unnecessary. Nonetheless, Rosoff elegantly portrays how we often become who we need to be.
