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Saturday, August 20, 2011

03. Coming of Age · Search for Identity

How I Live Now By Meg Rosoff

Annotation:
A journey. A statue. A feeling. A war. A soul mate. A day. A difference. A phone ringing. A garden. A chance.

Recommendation:

This is one of the things I most dislike about nature,
namely that the rules are not at all precise.



Art, it has been said, is anything you can get away with. If so, Meg Rosoff has gotten away with a novel for young people that has violence, incest, war and . . . cigarette smoking! Rosoff even gets away with murder in her novel, How I Live Now, as she has penned a truly brilliant work of literary art.

When a book is really good, you're compelled to keep turning its pages. When the writing is exquisite, you're forced to pause, and sometimes grab a bookmark and stop reading for a while -- so you can think, or breathe, or just let it wash over you. It took me a long, long time to read Rosoff's short 200-page novel. I kept stopping to linger in the magical reality of her world of words -- and to laugh at the surprisingly funny observations of her protagonist: Daisy.

Daisy, a sophisticated, 15-year-old New Yorker, is on vacation visiting relatives in the English countryside when terrorists attack London, plunging the world into prolonged war. That's what the plot's about. The story however, is about personal culture, perseverance, self-acceptance, love, loss, chance and change.


But the summer I went to England to stay with my cousins everything changed. Part of that was because of the war, which supposedly changed lots of things, but I can’t remember much about life before the war anyway so it doesn’t count in my book, which this is. 

Mostly everything changed because of Edmond. 

And so here’s what happened.

 
Powerful, provocative and poetic, it is a timeless story, beautifully told. As for the taboo romance, violence and cigarette smoking . . . that's how we live now. America's youth are growing up while trying to make sense of a post - 9/11 world at war. Meg Rosoff's masterful work of art may well be of some help in that endeavor, for in the reading of her novel, we learn what it is to experience more than we understand.




Nomination: Yes

Genre Classification:
Coming of Age Novel, Printz Winner, Realistic/Edgy

Citation: Rosoff, Meg. How I Live Now. New York: Random House, 2004. Print.

Meg Rosoff info:
http://www.megrosoff.co.uk/













Words of a Feather

What I Was 
by Meg Rosoff

Love
by Toni Morrison

Shattered: Stories of Children and War
ed. by Jennifer Armstrong

Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People, and War
by Yukio Tsuchiya,  illustrations by Ted Lewin

 
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