Meg Rosoff

Having just finished [book: Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You] I don't know why I picked up another story about a depressed young man. Too much depressed young man stuff for one week! Anyway, I think this book will strike your average reader as kind of weird because the titular Justin Case (get it?) has an imaginary dog and Fate talks to him and it's neither fun nor whimsical. It's actually mostly philosophical and troubling.

Maybe Rosoff wrote this book as a kind of meditation on the meaning of life for people who question if it even exists (meaning, that is). Maybe the point of this book is that you must learn to deal with uncertainty to be happy. It's deep stuff with minimal action.

I think I would've loved this book at 16 or 17, during my own philosophically dark days. It's definitely better with the greyhound cover.… (mais)

So while I was reading this book a couple people asked me what it was about and having not prepared a booktalk for it (or even finished it), I usually started by saying, "Well there's this teenage girl who goes to live in England and she falls in love with her cousin and a war breaks out and she's anorexic." That makes the book sound terrible.

Really any list of things that happen in this book (incest, eating disorders, terrorism, an evil stepmother, magical psychic children) can make it sound terrible. What makes it not terrible is the voice of the narrator, the quality of the writing, and this overall unapologetic attitude the book gives off. It doesn't apologize for the incest, the anorexia, the terrorism, or the magical psychic stuff. And because the book is strongly written I didn't find myself questioning the author's choices or being grossed out or offended.

I really really liked this book.… (mais)