How I Live Now

1. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rosoff, Meg. HOW I LIVE NOW. 2004. New York: Wendy Lamb Books. ISBN: 9780553376050.

2. PLOT SUMMARY

In Meg Rosoff’s, HOW I LIVE NOW, fifteen-year-old Daisy has a turbulent relationship with her father and pregnant stepmother. She is sent from her home in New York City to live with her aunt and teen cousins Edmond, Isaac, and Osmond, as well as their nine-year-old sister Piper at their farmhouse in the English countryside. Upon arrival to her aunt’s home, Daisy, who also struggles with an eating disorder, surprisingly feels that she “belonged to this house for centuries.” Daisy and her cousins often find themselves living alone, since Aunt Penn travels abroad. The cousins forge a bond—at times familial, amorous, and mystical. However, their carefree days abruptly come to an end when an unnamed enemy invades England. Daisy and Piper are forced to separate from the others and leave the safety of their home. Then begins Daisy’s struggle to survive in the countryside, desperate to find and rejoin her cousins, especially Edmond with whom she has fallen in love.

3. CRITICAL ANALYSIS

In the 2005 Michael A. Printz Award winning novel, HOW I LIVE NOW, author Meg Rosoff creates a gripping tale of teens becoming embroiled in World War III on the shores of a slightly futuristic England. Readers are told the story through the eyes of Daisy, a fifteen-year-old girl grappling with discovering who she is and where she belongs. Rosoff depicts Daisy as being insightful, sarcastic, and vulnerable. Over the course of the novel, Daisy evolves from a narcissistic teen to a survivor who is determined to save her cousins from harm.

Rosoff writes vivid descriptions of the characters, their actions, and the English countryside. For example, this is shown when Daisy describes her first encounter with Edmond: “…hair that looked like he cut it himself with a hatchet in the dead of night…he’s exactly like some kind of mutt…the ones you see at the dog shelter who are kind of hopeful and sweet and put their nose straight into your hand.” Daisy’s cousins also have the eerie ability to read minds. However, Rosoff is careful not to make the novel feel like science fiction, and instead the telepathy only emphasizes the uncommon bond that the cousins feel for one another.

While much of the plot seems plausible, Rosoff neglects to elaborate on some details that readers may want answered. Who are the hostile invaders infiltrating England? How do telephone and television communications become so widely disrupted? Why do English forces feel it necessary to split up the cousins? However, readers will be riveted to follow Daisy as she shares her coming of age story—discovering a place where she finally feels she truly belongs, finding her first love, and doggedly surviving in the wilderness when the world is crumbling around her. Rosoff does well to show how scared and defenseless Daisy feels as she tries to safely lead her young cousin Piper through the countryside, out of sight of hostile forces and in search for her other cousins. “For some stupid reason I started to cry then and I felt completely choked with despair and worthlessness and I couldn’t believe I was trying to lead Piper miles across England to find something the side of a microbe on a map when in my real life I couldn’t even find a clean pair of underpants in a chest of drawers.”

While the novel is written as Daisy’s stream of consciousness, long, run-on sentences are often cumbersome to read. Rosoff also seems to throw out grammatical rules—eliminating the traditional use of dialogue and instead prose and conversation are strung together. Readers may appreciate this somewhat creative way of telling the story, but it may also be distracting to some.

Many readers will have a hard time putting this novel down and will want to discover what becomes of Daisy and her cousins. However, some readers may be disturbed by some of the events that occur in the novel, including an intimacy that develops between Daisy and Edmond, and violent actions taken by the occupiers. During the last few chapters, Rosoff takes readers six years into the future and provides some insight on how the global conflict has impacted the cousins. While readers are taken on a rollercoaster ride of emotions, with elements of the story being funny, sad, troubling, and exciting, the novel ends with Daisy finding peace within herself and hopeful for new beginnings.

4. AWARDS WON AND REVIEW EXCERPT(S)

• Publisher’s Weekly: "This riveting first novel paints a frighteningly realistic picture of a world war breaking out in the 21st century…Like the heroine, readers will emerge from the rubble much shaken, a little wiser and with perhaps a greater sense of humanity."
  
  
• School Library Journal: “Daisy's voice is uneven, being at times teenage vapid, while elsewhere sporting a vocabulary rich with 50-cent words, phrases, and references. Rosoff barely scratches the surface of the material at hand. At times, this is both intentional and effective … but for the most part the dearth of explanation creates insurmountable questions around the basic mechanisms of the plot.”
  
  
• Kirkus Reviews: “This is a very relatable contemporary story, told in honest, raw first-person and filled with humor, love, pathos, and carnage.”
  
  
• 2005 Winner of Michael L. Printz Award
  
  
• 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize
  

5. CONNECTIONS

• Recommended for young adult readers ages 14 and up.
  
  
• Other YA fiction novels of dystopia that may be of interest to readers include:
  -Collins, Suzanne. THE HUNGER GAMES. 2008. New York: Scholastic, Inc. ISBN: 9780439023481.
  -Dashner, James. THE MAZE RUNNER. 2009. New York: Delacorte Books for Young Readers. ISBN: 9780385737944.
  -Grant, Michael. GONE. 2008. Katherine Tegen Books. ISBN: 9780061448768
  -Haddix, Margaret Peterson. AMONG THE HIDDEN. 1998. New York: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing. ISBN: 9780689817007 (first book of the Shadow Children Sequence).
  -Lowry, Lois. THE GIVER. 1993. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN: 9780395645666 (first book of a trilogy).
  
  
• To learn more about author Meg Rosoff, visit her Web site at: http://www.megrosoff.co.uk/
  
  
• Other fiction books by Meg Rosoff include:
  -Rosoff, Meg. JUST IN CASE. 2008. New York: Penguin Group (USA). ISBN: 9780452289376.
  -Rosoff, Meg. WHAT I WAS. 2008. New York: Penguin Group (USA). ISBN: 9780452290235
  -Rosoff, Meg. THE BRIDE’S FAREWELL. 2009. New York: Penguin Group (USA). ISBN: 9780670020997.