The book starts slowly, the observations veering from the banal to the insightful. Ever since The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, a similar crossover novel from the young adult market, the naive observation of the grown-up world can seem contrived.

Yet the second half of this novel is a thing of poetic beauty. As No descends into alcoholic despair, all parties break trust with each other to do the right thing. You could meditate on some of Lou’s hard-won wisdom as she is forced to change. She starts out absolute and ends in nuance. It is, as any parent has said to a child on forcing him or her to tip the crab out of the bucket, more complicated than it looks at first.

The book creaks a little at the start. But once the plot gets going, de Vigan’s account skirts the clichés of foundling literature with economy and grace.....

....Lou’s voice is both distinctive and direct, and the novel’s unshowy negotiation of a complex issue should give readers of all ages something to consider.

Well-structured, with moments of tenderness and truth about family and home, inadequate parents and neglected children, No and Me is honest (as revealing and insightful about Lou and home life as it is about No and homelessness) but also at least partially reassuring. Lou's "large-scale experiment against fate" might not go quite according to plan, but De Vigan shows that things really can change, albeit not always in the ways we've anticipated, and not always in ways we can control.