How I Live Now
Nov. 13th, 2007 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
library_mamaHere’s one that I started in my Dear Reader emails and then finished. The book was not at all what it seemed like it would be after reading the first 20 pages.
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff. Narrated by Kim Mai Guest. Fifteen-year-old Daisy is only a little nervous when she leaves her pregnant stepmother in New York to stay with her aunt and cousins in the English countryside. She loves suddenly being part of a large family, and the old farm house with its animals. Then, her aunt leaves the country for a few days. England is attacked and the borders are sealed, leaving four teens and nine-year-old Piper alone in the big house. Somehow, Daisy falls in love with her younger cousin Edmond (fourteen), who seems to be able to read her thoughts. In spite of the ickiness factor, but aided by the war, they have a tender romance that gets only as explicit as “not chaste”. Then the children get discovered and separated, the oldest brother joining the military, Daisy and little Piper to one house, Edmond and his other brother to another, hours apart. As the war gets worse, Daisy knows that it’s up to her to reunite the only family she’s ever felt she belongs in. And as food gets scarcer, the eating disorder she brought over from New York, while never made a focus of the story, starts to look very different.
At the height of the book, Daisy and Piper are traveling secretly across England by foot, foraging for food, and trying to find Edmond, whom Daisy can still hear faintly in her mind. What started off looking like a loveable family drama turns quickly into a survival adventure, with quite explicit and gory violence. If you’re up for that, the story is compelling, with steady action and characters you really care about. The setting is close enough to reality to feel close to home, yet just removed enough to keep it from being a direct commentary on current events. The tangential treatment of an eating disorder worked a whole lot better for me than writing a whole book focused on Girl with Eating Problem. The narrator of the audio book sounds utterly believable as a young teen, making the horrors she experiences that much more vivid. This is a book that will have you inventing reasons to keep listening.
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff. Narrated by Kim Mai Guest. Fifteen-year-old Daisy is only a little nervous when she leaves her pregnant stepmother in New York to stay with her aunt and cousins in the English countryside. She loves suddenly being part of a large family, and the old farm house with its animals. Then, her aunt leaves the country for a few days. England is attacked and the borders are sealed, leaving four teens and nine-year-old Piper alone in the big house. Somehow, Daisy falls in love with her younger cousin Edmond (fourteen), who seems to be able to read her thoughts. In spite of the ickiness factor, but aided by the war, they have a tender romance that gets only as explicit as “not chaste”. Then the children get discovered and separated, the oldest brother joining the military, Daisy and little Piper to one house, Edmond and his other brother to another, hours apart. As the war gets worse, Daisy knows that it’s up to her to reunite the only family she’s ever felt she belongs in. And as food gets scarcer, the eating disorder she brought over from New York, while never made a focus of the story, starts to look very different. At the height of the book, Daisy and Piper are traveling secretly across England by foot, foraging for food, and trying to find Edmond, whom Daisy can still hear faintly in her mind. What started off looking like a loveable family drama turns quickly into a survival adventure, with quite explicit and gory violence. If you’re up for that, the story is compelling, with steady action and characters you really care about. The setting is close enough to reality to feel close to home, yet just removed enough to keep it from being a direct commentary on current events. The tangential treatment of an eating disorder worked a whole lot better for me than writing a whole book focused on Girl with Eating Problem. The narrator of the audio book sounds utterly believable as a young teen, making the horrors she experiences that much more vivid. This is a book that will have you inventing reasons to keep listening.
