How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

Monday, November 2, 2009

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

Thanks to the recommendation of the talented Kristin Miller, I started reading How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff last week, and I am forever changed.

Book Description:

Fifteen-year-old Daisy is sent from Manhattan to England to visit her aunt and cousins she’s never met: three boys near her age, and their little sister. Her aunt goes away on business soon after Daisy arrives. The next day bombs go off as London is attacked and occupied by an unnamed enemy.

As power fails, and systems fail, the farm becomes more isolated. Despite the war, it’s a kind of Eden, with no adults in charge and no rules, a place where Daisy’s uncanny bond with her cousins grows into something rare and extraordinary. But the war is everywhere, and Daisy and her cousins must lead each other into a world that is unknown in the scariest, most elemental way.

How I Live Now is an amazing voice-driven and heartbreaking novel about teenage emotions - love, loss, pain, and hope. Told from Daisy's first person POV, her voice comes right off the page from the very beginning. Her voice keeps the pace moving quickly, and she glazes over more serious "adult matters" like the war so that I was actually shocked several times when I realized exactly what was going on in the outside world. Daisy's sarcastic humor is one of the truest to the teenage experience, that I've seen - especially when the world is falling apart around her. She made me laugh, cringe, and cry numerous times throughout the book, and her voice reflects the change and growth she goes through during the course of the novel. Definitely a must read for all YA fans.

Visit Meg Rosoff's website HERE.

8 comments:

M said...: I love your reviews. I wish more agents reviewed books on their blogs. I get why they don't, but I wish that they did.

*runs to add this to her TBR pile*; November 2, 2009 at 4:54 PM
Susan Adrian said...: Oooh. This sounds RIGHT up my alley. Thanks for the rec!; November 2, 2009 at 5:05 PM
Rhiannon Hart said...: I love this book :)

(By the way, maybe it's just my browser but I couldn't find the "post comment" link at first because it was white against a white background.); November 2, 2009 at 8:43 PM
Angiegirl said...: My love for this book is deep and wide. I'm so glad you loved it, too. I read it in a day. Got up the next morning and read it again. I couldn't leave. :); November 2, 2009 at 11:32 PM
passinglovenotes said...: I think on agent Laurie McLean's blog, she recently posted something about the post-apocalyptic theme becoming popular with YA readers.

Anybody else see a trend forming?; November 2, 2009 at 11:52 PM
suzie townsend said...: I agree that the post-apocalyptic theme is definitely becoming a popular trend within YA books, but How I Live Now was published first in 2004 and because of the narrative style and Daisy's voice, it's about so much more than the "war time" setting. I think it's in a class all on its own.; November 3, 2009 at 12:27 AM
Ash. Elizabeth said...: great review as always, and I'm letting you know I have something for you on my blog : ); November 4, 2009 at 8:30 AM
Rissa Watkins said...: Oh this book sounds good. Can't wait to read it.

It sounds like this blog I read (not mine I swear) it is fiction, but written like a real time blog after the apocalypse. I love it and dread when the year is up and it is over.

http://www.apocalypseblog.com/2008/12/17/shiny-new-thing/; November 4, 2009 at 6:26 PM

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Five Random Things About Suzie

1. I drink so much orange soda, it's probably running through my veins. I've been known to go through a twelve pack of diet sunkist in a day.

2. I'm legitimately nocturnal (or a vampire). I will be so exhausted at two pm that I'm falling asleep standing up - it has happened before, at Six Flags no less - but as soon as the sun goes down I'm wide awake.

3. I have a gorgeous unused $6000 Reem Acra wedding dress hanging in my closet, and it showed up on my doorstep the same day my (now ex) fiance broke up with me. And thank God for that. I wouldn't have wanted to waste that dress on him.

4. Social anxiety plagues me daily. I write a script and practice in front of the mirror when I have to make a phone call, but most people who interact with me have no idea how nervous I am (or perhaps they lie) because I've worked so hard to try to overcome it.

5. I'm actually worried that I will never love my children (when I do have them in the far off future) as much as I love my dogs. I just like animals better than people - they're sweet and innocent and soft and furry - is that so wrong?

quotes

金不一定閃
流浪者不都迷路

"I dreamed you bewitched me into bed

And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane
I think I made you up inside my head
I fancied you'd return the way you said
But I grow old and I forget your name
I think I made you up inside my head" ~Silvia Plath, Mad Girl's Love Song

"Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired." ~ Robert Frost

"Love is not love,
Which alters when it alteration finds." ~ William Shakespeare, "Sonnet 116"

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning-...So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, THE GREAT GATSBY

"For deadly secrets strike when understood
and lucky stars all exit on the run:
never try to knock on rotten wood,
never try to know more than you should." ~ Sylvia Plath, "Admonitions"

"The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become." ~ Milan Kundera, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING

William Wilberforce: "No one of our age has ever taken power."
William Pitt Jr: "Which is why we're too young to realize certain things are impossible. Which is why we will do them anyway."

"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." ~ Mark Twain

"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." ~ Mark Twain

“You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace.” ~ Charles Dickens, A MUTUAL FRIEND

"I think the idea of life after death is a bad idea. It distracts you from appreciating the uniqueness of the here and now, the moment you are living." ~ Joseph Campbell

"Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear...Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end." ~ Alan Paton, CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY

"To laugh often and much.. to endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better... To know even one life has breathed easier because you lived, This is to have succeeded." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover or friend, I have changed in their eyes...[Some see it as] a mission, as if ...they can pull me back from the wreckage of that day. Of course, their best efforts are largely useless. No one can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved." ~ Alice Sebold, LUCKY

"Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature's law is wrong it learned to walk with out having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping it's dreams, it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else ever cared." ~Tupac, The Rose That Grew From Concrete

Confessions

Monday, November 2, 2009