Book Review | Just In Case by Meg Rosoff

Just In Case by Meg Rosoff is about… a troubled teenager being pursued by the hand of fate

My Book Review Rating: 3 stars – an interesting look into teenage life when you feel like everything is out to get you.

I picked up Just in Case from the library a few months ago having heard good things about some of Rosoff’s other novels. The novel starts out in the bedroom of David Case; a teenage boy with a baby brother. A baby brother who decides that he wants to be a bird and stands a little too close to the window ledge. In that moment David loses his childhood innocence – his lack of fear – and starts to think what if…? David suddenly sees death everywhere in his everyday life and decides to change his name to Justin in an attempt to escape fate’s evil hand.

The novel then follows Justin as he tries to establish his new identity, make new friends and fall in love. All the time believing he is cursed and fate is out to get him — and you probably would to if you were Justin and death seemed to appear at every corner.

This was an intriguing novel; an easy one to read but one that makes you think. I wonder if at some level David Case had some kind of psychotic break the day his brother crawled on the window sill; Rosoff’s look into a disturbed teenager’s mind is sensitive and insightful.

Whichever level you read it on this is a book worth reading and I look forward to reading more of Rosoff.

Just in Case