How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
June 12th 2007 13:26
Since I somehow have managed to get at least a few hits here each week, it seems to me that there is at least a few people out there interested in reading this blog, so you know what, I'll take it up again (particularly since it's been over six months since I've posted in it). Since my grand schemes for rigid regularity have never worked in the past, I'll make this as easy going as possible.
So first book off the shelf (as opposed to first cab of the rank), even though I read it sometime back, is Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now.
One of the Australian publishing sensations of 1990s, and certainly very popular amongst people my age, was John Marsden's Tomorrow When the War Began series. It's premise was essentially that Australia had been invaded by an unknown enemy, and a small group of teenagers, who had evaded capture as they were camping at the the time of the invasion, effectively become a freedom fighter unit unto themselves. I enjoyed reading the series very much, but I can't say it has truly left a deep impression on me. How I Live Now, (which features a vaguely similar idea, albeit minus teenagers handling explosives) on the other hand, has a power that had I read it as a far more impressionable 13-14 year old, would have sunk deep into my bones.
14 year old Daisy is sent to live in England from New York with her cousins for the summer. She might be a New Yorker with plenty of wise-cracks up her sleeve, but she has a vulnerability too, so she slides into the gone-slightly wild ways of her cousins and her aunt with a touching believablity. She falls in love with her cousin Edmond, and for a while, everything seems ideal.
Then in the world outside their farmhouse and village, a war begins.
There are hints that this is related to terrorism, but Rosoff never confirms it totally. In fact, we never see the front line, for Daisy and her cousins are never drawn so near to it, which is not to say there is no violence or horror. But the profound sense of world ever changed by war comes through incredibly well. Rosoff not only looks at the emotional and pyschological impact of it, but also the practicalities, such as how much can go wrong when electricity is shut down on mass, and it makes you realise how much we rely on it ourselves today. There are moments of brutality (one scene in particular in the later part of the book is so vividly realised I had trouble reading the passages), and there are moments of happiness admist the rationing and the upset to 'normal' life.
This all works due very much to the two-steps-from-stream-of-cons ciousness style that Rosoff uses through the narrator Daisy. This allows us to get into the mindset of a young teenager who has enough issues of her own who is forced to take responsiblity very quickly. Which sounds terribly cliched putting into words like that, but the novel is far from it. It's like life, ugly and beautiful and happy and sad by turns, all heightened by a world breaking down.
How I Live Now won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. No prize though is needed to convey that this is a great book.
So first book off the shelf (as opposed to first cab of the rank), even though I read it sometime back, is Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now.
One of the Australian publishing sensations of 1990s, and certainly very popular amongst people my age, was John Marsden's Tomorrow When the War Began series. It's premise was essentially that Australia had been invaded by an unknown enemy, and a small group of teenagers, who had evaded capture as they were camping at the the time of the invasion, effectively become a freedom fighter unit unto themselves. I enjoyed reading the series very much, but I can't say it has truly left a deep impression on me. How I Live Now, (which features a vaguely similar idea, albeit minus teenagers handling explosives) on the other hand, has a power that had I read it as a far more impressionable 13-14 year old, would have sunk deep into my bones.
14 year old Daisy is sent to live in England from New York with her cousins for the summer. She might be a New Yorker with plenty of wise-cracks up her sleeve, but she has a vulnerability too, so she slides into the gone-slightly wild ways of her cousins and her aunt with a touching believablity. She falls in love with her cousin Edmond, and for a while, everything seems ideal.
Then in the world outside their farmhouse and village, a war begins.
There are hints that this is related to terrorism, but Rosoff never confirms it totally. In fact, we never see the front line, for Daisy and her cousins are never drawn so near to it, which is not to say there is no violence or horror. But the profound sense of world ever changed by war comes through incredibly well. Rosoff not only looks at the emotional and pyschological impact of it, but also the practicalities, such as how much can go wrong when electricity is shut down on mass, and it makes you realise how much we rely on it ourselves today. There are moments of brutality (one scene in particular in the later part of the book is so vividly realised I had trouble reading the passages), and there are moments of happiness admist the rationing and the upset to 'normal' life.
This all works due very much to the two-steps-from-stream-of-cons ciousness style that Rosoff uses through the narrator Daisy. This allows us to get into the mindset of a young teenager who has enough issues of her own who is forced to take responsiblity very quickly. Which sounds terribly cliched putting into words like that, but the novel is far from it. It's like life, ugly and beautiful and happy and sad by turns, all heightened by a world breaking down.
How I Live Now won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. No prize though is needed to convey that this is a great book.
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Comment by JacquiB
on Has Al Gore's film made a difference?
Children's Literature
As to what needs to be done: education, action, and people working together. Which might sound simplistic, but that's what's going to have to go on to support the practical aspects (such as alternative engery sources) for it to go ahead.