How I Live Now: Meg Rosoff

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There she'll discover what real love is: something violent, mysterious and wonderful. There her world will be turned upside down and a perfect summer will explode into a million bewildering pieces. She smiled a funny kind of smile just then like she was trying to keep from laughing or maybe crying, and when I looked at her eyes I could see she was on my side which as far as I’m concerned made a nice change and I guess had something to do with my mother being her younger sister who died. I didn’t mean to sleep practically a whole day and a night but I did. And when I woke up I thought how strange it was to be lying in someone else’s bed thousands of miles from home surrounded by grayish light and a weird kind of quiet that you never get in New York City where the traffic keeps you company in a constant buzzy way day and night. When Aunt Penn leaves for Oslo to help with peace negotiations, the five children are left alone at the old farmhouse. They feel far removed from any conflict, and hear conflicting reports. Warnings of small-pox keep people practically housebound, and idle days lead to an intense relationship between Daisy and her cousin Edmond.

It is not for Young Adults and if you have problems with being disturbed by sexual violence, dead children's bodies, or bombs/war, I will warn you that these scenes are gritty, realistic, gory, and disturbing. Kim Mai Guest is a narrator for this audiobook and damn! If it wasn't one of the best female voice performance I'd ever heard! As Daisy, she is this side of perfect: smooth reading with a little flippancy thrown in which was exactly how I imagine Daisy's voice would be. Now let's try to understand that falling into sexual and emotional thrall with an underage blood relative hadn't exactly been on my list of Things to Do while visiting England, but I was coming around to the belief that whether you liked it or not, Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much have to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop" Charming surrounding, extraordinarily charming characters (ohmigod Piper!!), in the mist of cruelty, death and loss all around...A daring, wise, and sensitive look at the complexities of being young in a world teetering on chaos, Rosoff’s poignant exploration of perseverance in the face of the unknown is a timely lesson for us all."– People Magazine How I Live Now is the first-person story of Daisy, a smart, stroppy, self-absorbed 15-year-old who arrives from New York's Upper West Side to stay with her English cousins. The four cousins are romantic, bohemian and enjoy an eccentric, faintly feral pastoral idyll of an existence in a rambling English country house, mystically in touch with nature and, indeed, with Daisy. She is a really, really self-centered narrator. There is a war going on, she doesn't seem to care. Daisy seems more concerned about her own problems and her *womp womp* sad poor-little-rich-girl life than anyone else around her, even when a bomb goes off in London and the world descends into chaos. For the first half of the book, her descriptions of the war and its devastation are described coldly, impersonally, there is no sense of danger, of mortality, of impending doom. Daisy is so detached from it all, in her own egotistical little mind. My name is Elizabeth but no one’s ever called me that. My father took one look at me when I was born and must have thought I had the face of someone dignified and sad like an old fashioned queen or a dead person, but what I turned out like is plain, not much there to notice. Even my life so far has been plain. More Daisy than Elizabeth from the word go. Have you heard about the YA book where the main character is banging her cousin? Whether your answer is yes or no, get ready to get acquainted with Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now, in which yes, the main character is banging her cousin.

She asked how my father was and said she hadn’t seen him in many years and I told her he was fine except for his taste in girlfriends which was totally un-fine, but he was probably feeling lots better now that I wasn’t around reminding him about it day and night. a b c d Tilley, Steve (13 September 2013). "Saoirse Ronan loads up again in 'How I Live Now' ". Toronto Sun . Retrieved 21 February 2017. Daisy's a spoiled, world weary New York teenager, which gets old fast, even without being in the middle of a war. The plot wasn't new. The characters weren't that rounded. The narrator's still pretty shallow even after she's forced to act like an adult. The writing might have been good, but not good enough to carry the entire production.

Reader Reviews

Stylistically, this book is stunning. The prose is insightful and puzzling, but necessary given the circumstances of the novel. Finally, a book which reads as if the narrator is actually recalling events, rather than the artificially produced recollection of events and conversations, verbatim, which we have grown so used to. Assured, powerful, engaging . . . you will want to read everything that Rosoff is capable of writing' - Observer How I Live Now is the powerful and engaging story of Daisy, the precocious New Yorker and her English cousin Edmond, torn apart as war breaks out in London, from the multi award-winning Meg Rosoff. How I Live Now has been adapted for the big screen by Kevin Macdonald, starring Saoirse Ronan as Daisy and releases in 2013.

There were many things I liked about the story - the fact that it didn't fit in any genre (it started as a story of an anorexic girl, then morphed into some kind of dystopia and then became a survival story), I liked Daisy's voice - snarky and witty with a healthy dose of unreasonableness and selfishness, the portrayal of war was gritty, and Daisy's personal struggle with weight was fairly compelling in spite of the fact that she obviously used anorexia as a means to divert her father's attention from her stepmom to herself.Years a Slave' Nabs Top Prize at London Critics' Circle Awards". Variety. Penske Business Media, LLC. 2 February 2014 . Retrieved 3 February 2014. How I Live Now also managed to make the short list for the LA Times Book Prize, the Whitbread Children's Book Award, and the Orange First Novel Prize. It's basically the Meryl Streep of YA books—so while cousins do get down and dirty with each other, rest assured that this isn't smut, but smut with a purpose. And here's the thing: The much-talked-about incest of How I Live Now is really tangential to the story of family and survival in a futuristic world war. The novel is also written as continuous prose, meaning there are no formatting breaks for dialogue (although paragraphs do still factor). This isn't my favorite style for literature, but it does work with the idea that Daisy is literally telling readers the story. a b c d Chang, Justin (13 September 2013). "Toronto Film Review: 'How I Live Now' ". Variety . Retrieved 4 April 2014. I didn't love this book. The truth is, after writing this review, I begin to wonder if I liked it. But that isn't to say that Daisy (and her younger cousin Piper) are not strong characters. Daisy may not make decisions that many people would agree with, but she does act on what she thinks is right (or at least on what she feels she has to do).