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Fifteen-year old New Yorker Daisy is sent to live in the English countryside with cousins she’s never even met.  When England is attacked and occupied by an unnamed enemy, the cousins find themselves on their own.  Power fails, systems fail.  As they grow more isolated, the farm becomes a kind of Eden, with no rules.  Until the war arrives in their midst.

Daisy’s is a war story, a survival story, a love story—all told in the voice of a subversive and witty teenager.  This book crackles with anxiety and with lust.  It’s a stunning and unforgettable first novel that captures the essence of the age of terrorism: how we live now.

Check out the contents of this blog for more information on the book and the author.

Teaching Questions

 Craft/Style: What stylistic techniques does Rosoff employ to achieve voice? How does she use this to achieve character development?

What rules does she break and why is this successful?

What is the significance of the book’s title?

How do world events described in the novel reflect the upheaval in Daisy’s own life?

How does this novel compare with others you have read that make a crossover between adult and children’s literature?

In 2004, How I Live Now scooped, a major prize for children’s fiction. Would you describe it as a novel for children? Can it be understood on different levels?

What did you think of Meg Rosoff’s vision of an occupied Britain in the 21^st century? Did you find it frightening? Believeable?

Why does the author choose an American narrator? What insights does she bring as a newcomer to British life and traditions? What do you think of the chatty, first-person style of the book?

Awards and Other Books

Awards for How I Live Now

2004  Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, winner

2005  Michael L. Printz Award, (US) winner

2005  Branford Boase Award, (first novel), winner

2005  LA Times Book Prize, shortlisted

2005  Whitbread Prize, shortlisted

2005  Der Luchs des Jahres, winner

2006  Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis, shortlisted



Other Books from Meg Rosoff and Their Awards

2007 Just In Case — Carnegie Medal in Literature, winner
2007 Just in Case — LA Times Book Prize, shortlisted
2007 Just in Case — Booktrust Teenage Prize, shortlisted
2007 Just In Case — Costa Book Awards, shortlisted
2008 Just In Case — Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis, winner
2008 What I Was — Carnegie Medal in Literature, shorlisted
2008 What I Was — Costa Book Awards, shortlisted
2009 What I Was — New Angle Prize, shortlisted
2009 What I Was — Der Luchs des Jahres, winner
2010 The Bride's Farewell—YALSA Alex Award Winner

Author's Page

http://www.megrosoff.co.uk/

http://www.megrosoff.co.uk/blog/

Effectiveness in Expressing the YA Voice

The voice of How I Live Now is written in a way that expresses the point of view and character of a typical young teenage girl. The techniques Rosoff employs that bring out Daisy’s character and age are:
- The use of run-on sentences
- Not using quotation marks
- Use of modern American teenage vernacular
All of these contribute to a casual writing style that suggests that the main character is writing in a journal and which also gives the impression and style of an oral narrative. The story is told from the character’s nostalgic older-self looking back on the events that brought her to where she is. It is considered a young adult narrative because it’s written in an in-the-moment voice where the reader is experiencing the events along with the narrator.
     The narrator’s growth and change in the years after the war are seen through the juxtaposition of the writing style in the first part of the book with the style of the second. In the second part, Daisy writes in shorter, neater, and altogether more concise sentences, omitting exclamations, and using quotation marks. This suggests a shift in maturity that the character reaches by the end of the book. In this way Rosoff captures the coming-of-age theme of young adult literature.
Other young adult themes that the reader encounters are through the situations that Daisy is forced into that test her maturity. For example, she must act more like an adult when there are no adults present for much of the story. She explores a typical adolescent curiosity about sex and sexuality, and Rosoff considers the affect of underage sex on teenage emotionality. Daisy also develops a kind of maternal instinct when she must take care of Piper by herself.
     Rosoff uses the themes of war and safety to illustrate a young adult worldview, especially that of Western cultures. As Daisy recounts her time in England during the war, everything is perfect and beautiful until she is unceremoniously kicked into the real world where the war is closer than she’d like to admit. Her experiences in the perfect bubble of the farm starkly contrast with the dark and tragic reality of the world outside. As all of this is happening the reader realizes how fragile and blind that false sense of security, the feeling of invulnerability that many young adults exemplify, that Daisy had lived under was. Due to her ignorance and isolation, her understanding of the larger picture and the immediacy of their danger contributed to a microscopic worldview; nothing mattered that did not immediately affect her world. The experience of the young adult in this novel is not just a realization of self, but also a realization of the larger world outside of the self.

Relationship with the YA Genre

Meg Rosoff’s novel How I Live Now expresses literary themes and techniques that are in tune with those that define the genre of Young Adult literature. Young Adult literature generally, although there are some exceptions/additions to these rules, focuses on a character(s) within the young adult age range, 13-22. They are usually told in first person, and follow the character through his or her development of identity and personality. In How I Live Now, we get fifteen-year-old Daisy’s first person narrative of her life during a war stricken present-day England. Through her narration we follow the personal changes she undergoes, physically, emotionally and psychologically, within the larger context of the war. This book specifically focuses on the effects of war on adolescents. Though there are some adult concepts, such as sex, it is nonetheless relatable to a general Young Adult audience for its ability to work through the coming-of-age themes that young adults undergo.

Author Biography

My biography will prove incredibly inspiring to anyone who wasn’t born in Beijing or Kathmandu, wasn’t sent to school in Switzerland or Peru, didn’t marry a diplomat at 19, and doesn’t speak 9 languages.

I was born in Boston, in 1956, second of four sisters, grew up in the Boston suburbs, went to ordinary suburban schools for most of my youth, and was rejected from Princeton in 1974 so went to Harvard instead.

I didn’t like Harvard much, but Princeton would have been worse, though I didn’t know that then.

After three years of thinking ‘I’ve got to get out of here’, I applied to art school in London, was accepted for a year studying sculpture, packed a bag and got on a plane. I stayed in a bed and breakfast in Knightsbridge until I found a room in a flat in Camden Town, with an architect who later became my boyfriend. Art school was a disaster (I was obviously a writer not a sculptor, but I didn’t know that then, either) but the rest of the year was a revelation. There was an unbelievable amount of fun to be had in London in 1977-78. I’m still reeling.

Eventually I returned to the US to finish my degree, moved to New York City, spent ten short years working in publishing and advertising, and then one day quit my job, told all my friends I was going back to London for three months, and have been here ever since.

My husband is an English painter and my daughter is a mongrel with her heart in the American suburbs and the accent of a North London fishmonger. After a fifteen-year stint in advertising (which I recommend to no one) my youngest sister died of breast cancer. And I thought if I was going to write a book, I’d better do it soon because life is short.

So I did.

http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=58449&view=full_sptlght

Book Trailer

Meg Rosoff 2006 Teen Book Video Award Winner -- HOW I LIVE NOW

Interview with the Author

From The Sunday Times

November 14, 2004

Interview: Amanda Craig meets Meg Rosoff

Suffering? It’s how I live now

Every silver lining has its cloud. Meg Rosoff’s first novel, How I Live Now, had no sooner been bought for six figures after a bidding war on both sides of the Atlantic than she discovered that she had breast cancer.

She was in hospital in July having her first session of chemotherapy when flowers and cards flooded in congratulating her on publishing what has been the most remarkable debut of the year.

The book has gone on to win The Guardian fiction prize, was last week shortlisted for the Whitbread best children’s novel and is hotly tipped to win the Whitbread book of the year.

Second only to the Man Booker in pre-eminence, the Whitbread prize is awarded to “the most enjoyable book of the year” and has a habit of overturning expectations.

Philip Pullman became the first children’s author to win it for The Amber Spy-Glass two years ago. Last year Mark Haddon became the second, with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and this year Rosoff looks likely to make it the third in a row.

However, while Rosoff is delighted, the triumph is overshadowed by the disease which has already killed one of her four sisters.

“I had six months of feeling deliriously happy that my novel was being published and I was able to quit my job in advertising, which is such a great moment and everybody’s dream, and in those six months of excitement I missed my annual mammogram,” she says dryly.

“Then they found it. Two of my sisters have had a particularly aggressive form of the cancer. You don’t get a prognosis about whether you’re going to live. I’m halfway through my chemotherapy and with each dose it gets worse. It doesn’t hurt but you feel nauseated the week after so that even cranberry juice makes you feel sick because it’s the same colour as the medication.

“There’s no doubt now that it’s inherited from both parents. I have a geneticist friend and he said, ‘You’re an Ashkenazi Jew, so you’re hard-wired for intelligence, depression and breast cancer’.”

The irony of her situation is underscored by the fact that How I Live Now, written in what Haddon describes as “a magical and utterly faultless voice”, is a profound meditation on death and bereavement, wrapped up in a compellingly topical narrative.

The brilliance of How I Live Now is that it strikes at the nerve in us all about the threat of terrorism. It is set at a time when London is being bombed by terrorists and invaded by “the Enemy”.

Rosoff’s heroine, the angry, anorexic 15-year-old Daisy, has been sent from New York to England to stay in the countryside with her aunt and four cousins. She falls blissfully in love with all of them, particularly the 14-year-old Edmond, and an idyll of near-incestuous underage sex ensues when Daisy’s aunt flies off to negotiate in peace talks abroad.

Daisy’s pin-sharp observations of her cousins and of English country life make it seem like a version of Dodie Smith’s classic, I Capture the Castle. However, as she warns us, “it would be so much easier to tell this story if it were all about a chaste and perfect love at an Extreme Time in History. But let’s face it, that would be a load of crap”.

The chaos in London at first seems remote. Daisy says in one of the novel’s most memorable lines: “No matter how much you put on a sad expression and talked about how awful it was that all those people were killed and what about Democracy and the Future of Our Great Nation the fact that none of us kids said out loud was that WE DIDN’T REALLY CARE. Most of the people who got killed were either old like our parents so they’d had good lives already, or people who worked in banks and were pretty boring anyway, or other people we didn’t know.”

What follows is harsh and heartbreaking. The selfish, incurious teenager is forced to discover her own capacity to care when, separated from Edmond and the boys, she finds herself solely responsible for Piper, her youngest cousin. The two lost and starving girls have to find their way home, making an epic journey across the English countryside.

“I was dying, of course, but then we all are,” Daisy remarks in a voice which flips between irony and anguish in the twitch of a sentence. “Every day, in perfect increments, I was dying of loss.”

Her 48-year-old creator says that she drew on her teenage self for parts of Daisy, and one thing they patently share is courage.

Rosoff has covered her bald head, formerly adorned by thick springy dark hair, with a Vermeer-style scarf. Wearing beautiful earrings and no make-up on her pale face, she is the incarnation of the witty, New Yorker-reading American expatriate. Despite the horrors of her illness she is devoid of self-pity.

“I’m not a worrier. When people rang up and said, ‘What a tragedy, your family is so unlucky’, I said that I expected it. You don’t get through life without something terrifying happening.”

Daisy may talk like a character out of Friends or The Princess Diaries, but she is forced to confront and survive things that no child, or indeed anyone, expects to live through.

“I refuse to be frightened and I hate the whole culture of fear that is making people afraid to travel on the Tube,” Rosoff says.

“There’s been a lot of criticism over Daisy’s casual remark that “seven or 70,000 people died’, but it’s the way people feel — it doesn’t affect People Like Us. Americans have always had this inborn sense that war always happens somewhere else to other people. One of my real goals in the novel was to show how there are no People Like Us any more.”

The daughter of a Harvard professor of medical science, Rosoff grew up in the heartland of American academic excellence and herself went to Harvard before coming to England at 19 to study art.

Like Daisy she has always felt that Britain is her spiritual home. Now married to an English painter, with an eight-year-old daughter and living in north London, she spent the next 20 years as an advertising copywriter, claiming that she was “a complete failure and never held down a job for more than two years”, writing commercials for products such as Persil.

When she began to write her first novel in slack periods at work and at home in the evenings, she could not believe the freedom that it allowed her. She loved it.

“I didn’t know anything about writing a novel although I’ve been a fanatical reader all my life,” she says in her soft, hesitant voice. “I was used to writing what I thought were brilliant ads and then having a test-panel of housewives say they didn’t like them.

“I only came up with the story in the taxi on my way to see my agent and I asked her whether I was allowed to write in the first person. She said, ‘You don’t have to think about your audience. There are no rules. Just write a terrific book and someone will read it’.”

Now in its fifth reprint it has become another “crossover” book that has grown by word of mouth into a bestseller.

What has surprised her is that elderly people, who remember the second world war, love it as much as teenagers. Obsessed with the first world war herself, she used details from both world wars — how, for instance, all signposts and railway station signs were removed — to paint the scenes through which Daisy and Piper struggle. The Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands was another source.

So were the half-joking north London dinner parties last year in which people would discuss whose cottage in Wales they would flee to in the event of a dirty bomb going off, before concluding that they would all be killed before they could go anywhere.

“It’s partly being Jewish, and partly being an American living over here, but I was shocked by how close England came to being occupied in the second world war and how little that has sunk in. I wrote the novel in three months, between January and March of last year, just before the invasion of Iraq; there was that atmosphere around.”

Rosoff describes the teenagers in her book as “weird, lateral-thinking children, changelings”. They survive through luck, an intimate knowledge of plants and wild-life and bloody-mindedness, but are changed for life. “Children are endowed with rare and subtle talents,” she says, “and our faults are sometimes more useful in life than our so-called ‘good’ qualities.”

The grief and black humour that reverberate through How I Live Now are unmistakably authentic: Rosoff says now that she “wrote about things I didn’t know I knew”.

Rosoff was with her sister Debbie as she was dying; she flew to America a few weeks after September 11, 2001 to find her sister, like Edmond in the novel, unable to speak. Now, when going through her own bone scans and chemotherapy, she cries “because this was what Debbie was going through and I didn’t know how it felt”.

Yet she did: and it is because she makes us laugh and cry through her characters’ suffering that she has written something that strikes at the heart of how we live now.



How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff is published by Penguin, £10.99

Jasper Gerard is away

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article390829.ece

Book Reviews

Kirkus Reviews
This is a very relatable contemporary story, told in honest, raw first-person and filled with humor, love, pathos, and carnage. War, as it will, changes these young people irrevocably, not necessarily for the worse. They and readers know that no one will ever be the same. (Fiction. 12+)

Booklist - Jennifer Mattson
Starred Review Gr. 8-11. Central to the potency of Rosoff's debut....is the ominous prognostication of what a third world war might look like, and the opportunity it provides for teens to imagine themselves, like Daisy, exhibiting courage and resilience in roles traditionally occupied by earlier generations.

Powells Bookstore Staff Pick
This book for young adults simply captivated me like so few novels for adults will. In a voice that could tell you how to change a light bulb yet still hold you transfixed, fifteen-year-old New Yorker Daisy recalls a summer in the British countryside with her cousins. War breaks out and the children must depend on each other to survive. Her tale is dark, beautiful, and wise. A breathtaking feat of storytelling.

Publishers Weekly Starred Review. This riveting first novel paints a frighteningly realistic picture of a world war breaking out in the 21st century. . . Readers will emerge from the rubble much shaken, a little wiser, and with perhaps a greater sense of humanity.

The Horn Book Starred review. This first novel is intelligent, funny, serious, and sweet; a winning combination of acerbic commentary, innocence, and sober vision... Hilarious, lyrical, and compassionate, this is, literarily and emotionally, deeply satisfying.

Kliatt
Starred review. Kliatt reviews a lot of YA novels, and when we pick up a new book to read and a narrative voice is immediately compelling, it’s a fantastic treat. . . . Daisy is an unforgettable heroine.

People Magazine
Rosoff’s narrative poise makes this a book for all ages.....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.

The Bulletin
Starred review. Daisy’s unapologetic narration is a shockingly funny, disturbingly poignant series of observations. . . . Readers will remain absorbed to the very end by this unforgettable and original story.

The Sunday Telegraph, UK
Readers won't just read this book, they will let it possess them.

The Guardian, UK
There are some pretty good children's novels out there, but it is only occasionally that one comes along with a voice so stridently pure and direct and funny that you simply can't question it¯you tumble willingly into its thrall.

Time Out
[T]he best children's novel for adults since The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

The Observer, UK
Rarely does a writer come up with a first novel so assured, so powerful and engaging that you can be pretty sure that you will want to read everything this author is capable of writing.

Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
That rare, rare thing, a first novel with a sustained, magical and utterly faultless voice. After five pages I knew that she could persuade me to believe almost anything.
http://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm?book_number=1475


That rare, rare thing, a first novel with a sustained, magical and utterly faultless voice. After five pages, I knew she could persuade me to believe anything.”
— Mark Haddon

“Daring, wise, and sensitive.”
— People magazine

“Powerful and engaging …a likely future classic.”
— The Observer (UK)

A crunchily perfect knock-out of a debut novel.”
— The Guardian (UK)
http://www.megrosoff.co.uk/books/how-i-live-now/

Other Book Covers

http://www.megrosoff.co.uk/books/how-i-live-now/

Book Cover Rationale

       The garden bookends the story and mirrors the state of the children’s emotions.  At the beginning it signifies all that is beautiful, good, and innocent, and becomes a significant background for  the children’s happiness in each other and in their isolated safe haven.  In the end, the garden is still breathtakingly beautiful, but its vivid beauty has been changed to something darker and more sinister.  It is no longer in a state of childlike innocence but has been transformed through Edmond’s bitterness and rage, and mirrors the emotional and psychological damage of the children by the war.

       The statue on the cover depicts a statue that was in the garden in the story. In the story the statue is described as an angel covered in moss and about the size of a child. It comes to symbolize death because, according to Piper, it is associated with a legend of  “a child who lived in the house hundreds of years ago and is buried in the garden” (7). The beautiful innocence of the garden is already marked by a statue that symbolizes the death of innocence and thus foreshadows the loss of innocence for the characters in the story. In the beginning the statue is covered in moss, and in the end Daisy notices the moss has been cleared away—the moss was a subtle protective covering that thinly veiled the deeper meaning of the statue, but once Edmond cleaned it off the statue’s meaning was made visible.

       The top of the cover fades into a dark green forest.  The story carries dark themes throughout the book so we wanted to include a dark element to the beauty of the garden..  The lettering of the title is slightly transparent, allowing the reader to look at what is behind it though a lens.  That lens is the childlike innocence that the characters lose.  Still being able to see the beauty of what is behind the letters says that the loss of innocence is not a loss of ever being happy again--it is simply being aware of the reality of the world.  We can still view the world, and people, for all their beauty even through the filter of the mature mind.