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.