Teen Stuff: 'how i live now' by Meg Rosoff
by Caser
In Meg Rosoff's Printz award winning novel, how i live now, the next world war takes place on British and American soil, and it's no good guys versus bad guys with appropriately color-schemed wardrobes. It's terrorism, chaos, distrust, and civil war. And the victims are not in uniform. They, like American teen Daisy living with her cousins in rural England, are civilians sequestered away from their families, surviving on food scraps and trying to avoid friendly fire or the next car bomb.
The narrative is told through Daisy's voice, captured in fragments, run-ons, and not-so-random capitalization for emphasis. This at first comes off as naive, a youth playing with style for its own sake, but as the stakes grow steadily higher and her family begins to rely on the strength she didn't realize she has, that same voice becomes poignant, even profound in its ability to capture a sense of truth amidst anarchy, a voice of reason in life during wartime. After reading the first half of the book, I nearly abandoned ship. After finishing the second half, I'm recommending it every chance I get.
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