Almost Nothing Happened

No doubt about it; Meg Rosoff is a bit of a genius. Her YA novels leap into life from the first page and never let up after that. In this story, plenty of action is balanced by passages of acute late-adolescent introspection, with 17-year-old Callum gradually and thankfully moving from gloomy self-loathing to the reverse. This is after a packed 48 hours charging round Paris on the back of a motor bike driven by beautiful teenage Lilou mostly at top speed. From just about surviving a lonely exchange visit which brings his already active sense of failure to an all-time low, Callum is redeemed in a plot involving theft,  police road blocks, a visit to a sex club, a mass demo against climate change and an almost fatal fire. He will have lots to tell his friends when he gets home but by this time he can hardly wait to get back to Paris and the growing affections of Lilou.

Rosoff takes no hostages when talking up to her readers. Proust and Dostoevsky get a mention as do MAGA and Taylor Swift. Short passages in French are sometimes translated or else left for readers to work out for themselves (never very hard). Callum remains a virgin, but has to endure listening to prolonged sexual activity in a bed immediately next to him. And all the time Paris is experiencing a heat wave so severe that a curfew is imposed every night, to stop any possible heat-related violence leading up to the Demo still taking place next day even though officially banned. Everything more or less gets finally straightened out, leaving many readers, including all those adults who now openly enjoy YA fiction, surely wanting even more. And why not? This is a brilliant novel.