What I Was by Meg Rosoff (2007)

Rosoff is a fairly ordinary writer - there is a sense of lack of finish in her craft. Often I had the unmistakable feeling taking me back to my days of reading manuscripts while reading this. That is not to say that, on rare occasions, she is not capable of pulling off a quiet reach up to some adroit profundity. The next thing to say is that this story has the makings of something magical: the 16-year-old boarder-schoolboy near the Suffolk coast in 1962 finding down winding paths a way to the lonely beach; finding a lost colony of fishermen's huts on a sandy island beyond the marshy extremities of a small estuary; finding there, in his erotic confusion, a very attractive boy about his own age who lives alone in the last inhabited hut, almost completely separated from society; befriending the stern, almost wordless boy, who fishes, fixes the hut, lives an active, masculine life; wanting, in his mixed desire and naivety, not to have the boy, but to be him; the interior of the hut worn but warm; the feeling of being out at the edge of the world, windswept, water-suffused and very alive, contrasting his miserable school existence. The part of Rosoff which 'found' this almost dreamlike delicate ideal-come-real and was able to write about it is the part I want to see more of. And there is a bit of quiet humour and the grimy everyday which balance this well. Then there is a twist in the story which, without giving it away, I can confirm as vastly silly. Rosoff has the boy, looking back in later life, call himself 'stupid'. Well, yes, he is. And so would we be to believe it. A novel banjaxed, in one fell swoop.