Meg Rosoff. Award Laureate 2016 1
Rosoff’s second novel, Just in Case (2006), which
won the Carnegie Medal, is about another lost teen. Fifteen-year-old David Case is struggling with his newfound insight into his own mortality. He decides to cheat Fate by becoming a different person. He changes his name to Justin and adopts a whole new lifestyle, but in the process he loses himself. With both humor and heartache, Rosoff traces the ways in which the world misunderstands Justin’s crisis of identity and tries to make him into someone he is not. The stream-of-consciousness narration – which mirrors the twists and turns in Justin’s brain – holds readers in an iron grip. Like the protagonist Holden in Salinger’s classic coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Justin clearly struggles with his perception of reality: he can hear the voice of Fate, and he keeps company with an imaginary dog. Body, identity and gender issues and themes of loss and memory are all central to Rosoff’s work. Her third novel, What I was (2007), takes the form of a retrospective personal history. It is a complex tale of friendship, love, and liberation, of reflections on a wounded past, and of difficult crossroads in life. The story takes place in the 1960s in a coastal landscape that is slowly sinking beneath the sea: a suggestive setting that mirrors the transgression of boundaries staged in the novel. In this barren world, we meet a sixteen-year-old narrator who has been sent off to a school for boys after being expelled from two previous boarding schools. His father demands that he clean up his act and become a man, but being a boy who measures up to the middle-class ideals of his family and school – popular, smart, athletic – is hard enough. Chafing at the future that has been laid out for him, he finds an escape when he meets Finn, a boy who lives alone in a shack by the ocean. In Finn he sees the person he would like to be, but his all-absorbing love has dramatic consequences and blinds him to who Finn really is. Rosoff skillfully varies narrative technique and perspective. She writes in familiar literary genres and narrative traditions, but adapts them freely for her own purposes. A clear example is the historical novel The Bride’s Farewell (2009). Set in the rolling English countryside