Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50365 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-30
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Synopsis
'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.

Customer Reviews

Excellent Read
This book conjures up the same heart warming, life-questioning emotions as How I Live Now did, something that I felt Just In Case did not.
I just wish Rosoff's books were longer, with such intriguing writing methods she constantly keeps us hooked to the story. Some how I have come to believe that Rosoff works best when describing the long and often harrowing journies of a person and the architecture of the buildings they come across, as both How I Live Now and What I Was contained these features, something that made the books stand out to me.
With Hilary describing his journey from St.Oswald school to the life he wishes he has in Finn's hut, both factors of architecture and journey are opened up and gives us a vivid imagination of what the journey is like. The emotion between two people, I believe, has never failed to be written well by Rosoff and at times can bring on laughter and tears with just one line.
I hope Rosoff will continue to write such amazing books as this.

Still brilliant
Even after the author's win last year, the Carnegie Medal nomination is well deserved. This is a thoughtful musing on age, youth, friendship, sex and gender set on the atmospheric Dunwich coast. No one else is writing books like this for teens, and though reluctant readers might find some of the language a bit challenging, enthusiastic book-loving readers will love it.

Not up to her previous standards
I greatly enjoyed Meg Rosoff's previous books, "How I Live Now" and "Just in Case," partly because of her writing style but partly because the novels included strong, subtle threads of magic. In "What I Was," the magic seems to have been ruthlessly excised, leaving the book as drab, grey and soggy as the boarding school it is set in. Disappointing.