What I Was

An award-winning young adult author writes a coming-of-age tale for adults set in the mid-twenty-first century. The unnamed narrator is miserable with his looks, his parents, boarding school life, and his own apathy. He stumbles on Finn, a beautiful boy who lives self-sufficiently in a small beach hut not far from the school. From that point, the narrator begins to take risks, having finally found something that makes sense of his life. The story depends heavily its setting--an isolated British coast--and Ralph Cosham's clear, articulate accent fits the protagonist and his world. While Cosham's delivery is devoid of great emotion--as if to represent the hero's hollowness--his reading becomes slightly breathy near the end, when the story's developing drama comes to a climax. S.W. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

October 15, 2007
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.