You’re thirteen years old. Boarding school is a prison which teaches nothing but useless knowledge. When you do manage to escape, it is only to spend a few days at home, at the far end of the bay, near your three beloved pine trees. There where the sky is limitless, where the maples are in flame, by the lake on which you fish, under the sky and its insane clouds. But that isn’t really living either, because you share a dark secret with your father. You know you must face life but you don’t know how.

Even when people keep repeating that as of now everything will change, even when you hear people all around you clamouring: “We will be our own masters! We will no longer be sheep!”, you don’t believe it, you remain glued to the floor by the heavy certainty that everything is finished even before it has begun. You roll around with your pain like a cat with a mouse.

Happily, there are the hours of solitude, where dreams take you elsewhere. There are your friends, who have some notion of the depth of your torment. But can our senses ever really be soothed by the presence of friends? There are books too, one especially, a huge book which describes marvellously the plants that you see all about you every day. There are also the crazy words that you scribble in the margins of your textbooks, words that you suspect might one day save you.

Que vais-je devenir jusqu’à ce que je meure ? offers up a stunning portrait of adolescence. In this novel written in the first person, Robert Lalonde renders the doubts and sudden flashes of an age which separates the child from the adult.