This Year's Reading
#4 How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
This debut novel got rave reviews and was shortlisted for pretty much every children's book award. It is hard to see why. It is extremely divorced from reality and told in a glib, uneven tone that makes the moments of attempted realism and emotional honesty hard to believe.
Our first person narrator is Daisy, a NYC teenager sent to live with her cousins in the English countryside on the eve of an undefined global war. She is fifteen but her voice is written like that of a 12 year old, even though we find out at the end of the novel that it is being written by her 21 year old self. Her age is given as fifteen presumably solely so she can have a sexual relationship - a relationship that is laughably glossed over - but the whole book has a "kidz rule, adults drool" feel appropriate for a much younger narrator and audience.
She is the only attempt at an actual character; her cousins are bizarrely presented as a bunch of holy fools and everyone else is an unconvincing placemarker. Both the macro and micro plots make no sense. The barely sketched war that engulfs them is ludicrous and the specifics of the war that touch Daisy's life make little sense. Presumably it is meant to be read as a fable and if you can succeed in reading it that way maybe you will get more out of it.
This debut novel got rave reviews and was shortlisted for pretty much every children's book award. It is hard to see why. It is extremely divorced from reality and told in a glib, uneven tone that makes the moments of attempted realism and emotional honesty hard to believe.
Our first person narrator is Daisy, a NYC teenager sent to live with her cousins in the English countryside on the eve of an undefined global war. She is fifteen but her voice is written like that of a 12 year old, even though we find out at the end of the novel that it is being written by her 21 year old self. Her age is given as fifteen presumably solely so she can have a sexual relationship - a relationship that is laughably glossed over - but the whole book has a "kidz rule, adults drool" feel appropriate for a much younger narrator and audience.
She is the only attempt at an actual character; her cousins are bizarrely presented as a bunch of holy fools and everyone else is an unconvincing placemarker. Both the macro and micro plots make no sense. The barely sketched war that engulfs them is ludicrous and the specifics of the war that touch Daisy's life make little sense. Presumably it is meant to be read as a fable and if you can succeed in reading it that way maybe you will get more out of it.