First, thank you Keertana for recommending this book to me. Your review pushed me to pick it up and I can’t tell you how glad I am that I did so.I have this fascination with books written in different languages. Mostly because I can’t read them and I am immediately convinced they are troughs full of treasure that are locked to me because of my inability to read them. This is the feeling that drove me to learn English when I was a kid and the same feeling that drove me to learn Korean. I’m still working on the Korean but French and I had a short relationship that spanned just the four months that made up one term. I may go back and try to learn it again but until then, I will remain ever thankful to translated books. There are not many out there but I will try to read the ones that are.I’m not so familiar with French lifestyle and culture to be able to comfortably comment on how French the novel is. And I don’t know if the translation changed the narrative in ways to make it accessible to North American readers (or should I say English readers). The book is told from the perspective of a very bright, very smart fourteen year old who is not just smart on paper but smart in the way she thinks and observes the world around her. No and Me is a painful novel. The pain, however, is juxtaposed by hope. There are different kinds of losses and Lou learns several heart wrenching lessons about life and people.This novel is inordinately beautiful. The prose, the relationships between the characters and the subtle romance. There is no brashness that is so common in North American YA protagonists. Lou is more restrained, in fact, the entire novel is somewhat restrained. The passion is there but the flavor is different. No broke my heart and I will long wonder what happens to her. And that I think is the ultimate success of this novel. The author creates characters who linger in your memory long after the pages of the book have been turned.
