How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

Rosoff, Meg. 2004. How I Live Now. New York: Random House. ISBN 0385746776

When Daisy's father marries and starts a new family with her "wicked" stepmother, Daisy is sent to England to live with her aunt and her cousins. While her aunt is rarely home, Daisy finds happiness for the first time in her life. She finds love in a sexual relationship with her first cousin, Edmond, and she finds friendship and understanding from her other cousins. But her happiness is short-lived when war breaks out and in order to survive and to protect those she loves, she has to grow up quickly.

I really, really wanted to like this book. And there were parts of the book that I did like: the narrator's stream of consciousness voice, the often poetic descriptions of the relationships that are formed in the book, and the sweet friendship that forms between Daisy and her younger cousin Piper. Daisy's journey from a self-absorbed teen to a responsible adult is believable and gripping, and she, as a character is engaging--funny and insightful by turns. The supporting characters (both the adults and the adolescents) are often believable, quirky, and endearing. But this book left me confused, quite frankly. I'm still wondering, Was this a book about war or a story of romance? Not that a book can't be both, but this one didn't achieve that for me. Although I liked the stream of consciousness effect overall, occasionally the run-on sentences drove me batty. There was much of this book that seemed real--the narcissism of teenagers, the British landscape--but there was so much of it that was vague (particularly about the government and the war) that I had a hard time suspending my disbelief.

REVIEWS AND RECOMMENDATIONS:

2005 Printz Award Winner

"Daisy's voice is uneven, being at times teenage vapid, while elsewhere sporting a vocabulary rich with 50-cent words, phrases, and references. In addition, Rosoff barely scratches the surface of the material at hand. At times, this is both intentional and effective (the enemy is never named) but for the most part the dearth of explanation creates insurmountable questions around the basic mechanisms of the plot. There is no explanation of how a small force could take out all communications (including cell phones) and proceed to overrun and to control an entire country. Perhaps even stranger, the ramifications of psychic abilities and underage sexual relationships between first cousins is never addressed." --School Library Journal

"This is a very relatable contemporary story, told in honest, raw first-person and filled with humor, love, pathos, and carnage. War, as it will, changes these young people irrevocably, not necessarily for the worse. They and readers know that no one will ever be the same. The story of Daisy and her three exceptional cousins, one of whom becomes her first lover, offers a keen perspective on human courage and resilience. An epilogue, set six years after the conclusion, while war still lingers, ends Daisy's story on a bittersweet, hopeful note." --Kirkus Reviews

CONNECTIONS:

This book would pair nicely with other "End of the World" novels like Alas, Babylon. Many of these feature nuclear destruction so it would be interesting to compare and contrast the fears of different time periods as shown through these novels.

This novel would be an excellent one to use as a guide for writing that falls outside of "five-paragraph-essay" type writing. Students could benefit by looking at the stream of consciousness style the author uses in the strong and compelling voice of Daisy.