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|---|---|---|
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Rosoff, M. | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Salem Main Library | TEEN FICTION Rosoff, M. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The day David Case saves his brother's life, his whole world changes. Suddenly every moment is fizzing with significance, full of what ifs? He must hide, become an entirely new person to escape fate - if he can. Bewildered and obsessive, he'll try anything to survive.
Author Notes
Meg Rosoff was born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 16, 1956. She studied at Harvard University, but left for England in 1977 to take classes at Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design. She returned to finish her degree in English and fine arts at Harvard University. She worked in New York City for 10 years in publishing and advertising, before moving to England.
Her first novel, How I Live Now, was published in 2004 and won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. Her other novels include What I Was, The Bride's Farewell, There Is No Dog, Moose Baby, and Picture Me Gone. Just in Case won the 2007 Carnegie Medal. She won the 2016 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. She is also the author of a picture book entitled Meet Wild Boars and co-author of a non-fiction book entitled London Guide: Your Passport to Great Travel.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-Fifteen-year-old David Case, scared out of his acceptance of dailiness by his baby brother's near calamity at an open window, changes his name to Justin and allows several new people into his life. He is befriended by a somewhat older-and definitely more worldly-girl when he enters a thrift shop to remake his sartorial presentation. Angela is easy to fall in love with, but frustrating for Justin and suspicious for readers. Peter Prince, on the other hand, a new friend who urges Justin to discover how very good he is as a distance runner, lives up to his surname. Justin's baby brother, Charlie, knowing and telepathic since birth, worries that Justin won't ever recover from the shock of having to haul him back from his experiment with flight. Justin's other companions on the journey through the six months between that momentous occasion and Christmas include an invisible dog, Peter's psychologically perceptive sisters, and their male rabbit, Alice. The crisis that flings Justin and Angela literally into bed together is a horrific plane crash at the local airport. As he runs from her gallery show of photos of him in shock in the disaster's aftermath, he collides with a woman from whom he contracts meningitis, nearly allowing Fate to talk him into dying. Only Charlie's visit to the hospital pulls Justin back from the existential abyss at which he has perched for six months. Rosoff writes of these characters and Justin's interior and exterior adventures with beautiful grace and wit. Even sensitive teens usually have more psychological armor than Justin, but Rosoff's made him a compelling hero, not a nerd.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Rosoff's (How I Live Now) intriguing, stylized novel explores the nature of fate and one teen's attempt to escape his own destiny. After witnessing his baby brother's brush with death, 15-year-old David Case becomes obsessed with his own mortality and decides to trick fate and thus prolong his life by changing his identity. He renames himself Justin Case, exchanges his wardrobe for thrift-shop clothes and befriends an imaginary greyhound, but his efforts to become someone else do not prove effective in quelling his fear that something horrific lies just around the corner. In the meantime, an eccentric young woman photographer discovers him and (much to the hero's horror) turns him into a poster child for "doomed youth." An omniscient, third-person narrative coupled with brief commentaries from all-seeing Fate give the story a surrealistic if not allegorical quality. Children seem older and wiser than their years; adults especially Justin's mother, who is shockingly blas? about the alterations in her son are cast as na?ve and out of touch. Geared to mature readers with a philosophical bent and an appreciation of irony, the novel shows how, by focusing on his inevitable end, Justin Case almost misses the opportunity to enjoy the gifts fate has to offer: namely, survival, love and friendship. Ages 14-up. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(High School) Though Rosoff's latest novel does not exude the raw energy of her much-lauded debut How I Live Now (rev. 9/04), it does offer an intelligent, uniquely embellished view of teen angst gone too far. Fifteen-year-old David Case begins to become unglued after saving his toddler brother from falling out of a window. Panic overtakes him as he contemplates the world's innumerable dangers: ""There were comets. Killer bees. Foreign armies. Floods. Serial killers."" Hoping to evade Fate, who is personified and interjects comments into the narrative, David changes his name to Justin, adopts an invisible pet greyhound, and meets fashion-forward nineteen-year-old photographer Agnes, who completes his disguise with a new thrift-store wardrobe. Fate's ranting here (""I'm the one with my finger on the scale, the bullet, the brakes"") is histrionic compared to the haunting voice of Death in Zusak's The Book Thief (rev. 3/06). More effective is the covertly sophisticated perspective of Justin's little brother, who may only be able to express himself in baby talk but thinks in complex sentences. The novel also poses interesting questions about the meaning of luck. Is Justin lucky to have narrowly missed being hit by a crashing plane, or unlucky to have been at the airport in the first place? Is Justin lucky because he loses his virginity to Agnes, or unlucky because he can't make her fall in love with him? Perhaps Justin's brother has the best response: ""A piano might fall on your head...but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen."" (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Rosoff examines the idea of fate through minutely observed, concatenated catastrophes and the intersection of exquisitely drawn characters (including a delusional protagonist), in an England-set novel as powerful as her Printz-winning debut, How I Live Now (2004). After barely managing to save his toddler brother from "flying" off a windowsill, David Case, almost 16, already struggling with acute anxiety, concludes that only a complete self-reinvention will save him from the sure doom that Fate holds--for his former self. Browsing in a charity shop to outfit the new him, now-Justin meets Agnes, an older, outrageously adorned photographer/fashion designer. She takes on the smitten Justin as a project, capturing his edgy desperation in photos. She rescues him from both a hallucinatory stint at the local airport (where wackily, he temporarily loses his imaginary dog), and (after clicking away voyeuristically with her camera) the bloody aftermath of a plane crash. Justin drifts away--from his outrageously preoccupied parents, school's banality; reality--but also toward connections that keep him this side of sane. Agnes's several betrayals--including her brief sexual attention--rekindle Justin's self-affirming anger. There's Peter, a compassionate, confidently nerdy schoolmate, whose sage little sisters fairly command Justin's emergence from a coma induced by spinal meningitis and prolonged by Justin's urge to surrender to a cynical, beckoning Fate, who vituperates, personified, in bold type throughout. Little Charlie, the ostensible reason for Justin's crackup, telegraphs, like a small, joyful Buddha, an uncomplicated truth that Justin, too, can finally embrace. Funny, ironic, magically real; stunning. (Fiction. YA) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Gr. 9-12. After rescuing his baby brother from an open window's ledge, 15-year-old David Case concludes just two seconds were all that stood between normal everyday life, and utter, total catastrophe. Convinced that Fate is toying with him, David tries to elude detection by creating a new identity, starting with his name and his wardrobe. Eventually, he refuses to return home and plunges into an affair with an older girl. In frequently inserted passages, Fate actually speaks, and it's clear that David's fears are warranted. Rosoff's second novel, following the Printz Award winner How I Live Now (2004), is an explosive, challenging story that sometimes reads more like metaphysical meditation than coming-of-age narrative. Starting with the wordplay of David's new name (Justin Case), the author's experimentation with story elements to further philosophical questions is sometimes distracting, and readers may feel distanced by characters who occasionally seem more like archetypes and intellectual vehicles than flesh and blood. Even so, many teens will relish Rosoff's wild, unsettling, often poetic plunge into subjects of cosmic proportion, such as faith, time, free will, illusions, and the boundaries of love and sex: Could sexual feeling be totally one-sided? While he ached with lust, was she thinking about shoelaces? Balancing ruminations on the connections between everything are the solid friendships: The answer isn't in your head, it's out here, with us, David's young friend tells him angrily. Readers will want to ponder the provocative questions that wrap around their own hopes and terrors. --Gillian Engberg Copyright 2006 Booklist