'Carnegie winner Meg Rosoff's What I Was will surely find a place on the shortlists for major prizes'
Publishing News 		'Meg Rosoff is one of a handful of gifted writers to have seized adolescence as a territory worthy of respect. (Her books) are mordantly funny and searingly well written, they read like Samuel Beckett on Ecstasy.'
The Times
'Readers of Rosoff's previous books, How I Live Now and Just In Case will know what a disturbing writer she is, and how disconcertingly she shifts the perspectives of time, place, reality and human relationships from those we are used to. What I Was maintains her remarkable gift for turning human life into an unfamiliar event. It's a highly original study of intense self-love, in all its solitude. Yet as before with Rosoff, this story of bleak and unstable existence ends on a surprising note of thanksgiving.'
Books for Keeps
"Every bit as compelling and all-encompassing as the multi-award-winning 'How I Live Now' and 'Just In Case' (for which she picked up this year's Carnegie Medal), What I Was is another coming-of-age novel which sucks the reader whole into its universe."
Five star review, Time Out
'The narrator of Carnegie Medal winner Rosoff's latest and perhaps most perfect novel is a 16-year-old boy who has been expelled from two boarding schools and finds himself dumped in a third, near the Suffolk coast. The school is all arbitrary rules, pretentious tradition and routine bullying. But on the beach nearby the boy finds a fisherman's hut occupied by beautiful, competent Finn, who is everything he wishes he could be himself: athletic, self-sufficient, able, free. The relationship that follows becomes an escape and an obsession, pure and transporting, and a turning point in a life remembered by the narrator at the age of 100. It makes us fall in love not only with Finn but also with the Suffolk coast, the land, the sky and the sea passionately described in airy and crystalline prose. It's already a classic.'
Sunday Times