I am a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor is the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore.
Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love.
I am sixteen years old.

This is how Rosoff starts her story. A sixteen year-old boy who has been expelled from two schools and is on his way to his third. St Oswald’s – a remote school in East Anglia.

One day when the school goes running, he wanders down the public footpath, trying to shake off Reese, his roommate. The footpath leads him to a hut on the coast. The tide is coming in so he decides to go inside and there he meets a Finn. Not registered at birth, Finn likes to keep himself to himself and works in the local market for food. No-one questions his being at all.

Their relationship grows and they start seeing each other more often. Finn is the master of their relationship until one day he falls fatally ill…

This book in my opinion was rubbish. A sixteen year-old boy who has been expelled from two schools is quite a good storyline for a children’s book. But Rosoff didn’t really work well with it. I found myself skipping paragraphs, sometimes pages at a time – just so I could see what was going to happen next. The ending of the story was quite good, but I found that Rosoff gave it away a little before she ended the book.

I would not recommend this to anyone unless utterly bored and looking for something to do. 4/10.