I Was Born For This by Alice Oseman

I Was Born for This by Alice Oseman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been meaning to read Alice Oseman’s work for a long while. It’s always a good sign when her books fly in and out of the library, quicker than swifts in summer, because that means they’re being read. Fiercely, voraciously, passionately. Always, always good things. And so when I saw I Was Born For This, I picked it up without hesitation and realised that the signs were true. Oseman writes a lovely, rich, heart-felt slice of humanity; and it’s beautiful. I am looking more and more for writers who value what it is to be human, and to look for this in their work, and she does this with absolute bells on.

I Was Born For This is a week in the life of a fandom. Angel is a fan of The Ark, a band on the cusp of phenomenal success, and Jimmy’s the lead-singer. They come together in the most challenging and complicated of circumstances and, in the process, figure out who they are and what they’re going to be in the world. It’s perhaps a traditional premise in the world of YA; meet-cute, inevitable romance, challenging circumstances separate the couple before Inevitable Things bring them back together at the end. But that’s not this book and to read it as such is to lose the massive heart at the centre of it. Oseman is interested in people, in the brutal messy truth that people are and can be, and she lets her characters live. Absolutely live. There’s no easy answers, no neatly compartmentalized ending, and it’s all the more richer for that.

I’m conscious for many people that sort of an ending might not work. It didn’t for me, at first, because I’m a greedy reader. When a book is as deliciously truthful as this, and stuffed to the brim with richness, I want more of it. But this is life, and things don’t always work the way I want them to. Acknowledging that, however, is important. I wanted this to end somewhere else than it did. But then, it’s not my story. It’s Angel’s and Jimmy’s and Lister’s and Juliet’s…

Oseman’s delivered something rich and wonderful here, and I’m so pleased to have more of her books yet to discover.

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