I Am the Cheese

I was recently visiting my friend and colleague Rozanna at South Pasadena Middle School Library, and somehow this title came up in our conversation. Robert Cormier is best known for The Chocolate War, published over fifty years ago now — a young adult novel about hazing at a private boys’ school. I thought I had read I Am the Cheese, but now I am pretty sure I never did. It is a YA version of a psychological thriller, where the plot flips back and forth between the young protagonist on a physical journey and the same protagonist trying to recover lost memory with the help of a psychiatrist (we think!) and some psychotropic drugs. Not sure yet whether it stands the test of time.

Later, after finishing: nope. Confusing, fraught, overwrought, contrived. Interesting how some authors who manage to achieve writing a “classic” can also write things that just don’t hold up. But, Rozanna says she really loved it, so maybe it’s really an example of Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science. Two of his laws are “Every book its reader,” and “Every reader his/her book.”