Book recommendation: “Just in case”

Summer holiday is the perfect time to dig deeper into an authorship. Why not get to know the fascinating work of this year’s ALMA laureate, Meg Rosoff? Throughout the summer we will publish a few book recommendations on the blog and today the book in focus is “Just in case” (2006).

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.