How I Live Now

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Bibliographic data:  

Rosoff, Meg (2004).  How I Live Now.  New York: Wendy Lamb Books.

 Summary:   

Immediately upon arrival, fifteen year old Daisy feels more at home with her cousins in their English country cottage than she ever did living with her father and stepmother in New York City.  This sense of home is disrupted when, only days after arriving, a bomb goes off in London and launches the whole country into war.  At first, Daisy and her cousins see the war as an exciting event that frees them from parental supervision, however soon enough the effects are disrupting their lives and upturning their world.

Analysis:

Rosoff has written How I Life Now in an interesting style that subtly allows the reader to get deep inside Daisy’s head.  The occasional untraditional capitalization, emphasis and sentence structure make the narration feel like the mind of a teenager, helping the reader to have a greater empathy and understanding of Daisy’s world.  This style would appeal to teenage readers while pulling them into the story.

Daisy is a multidimensional character, making a few very questionable choices while overall being a very caring, thoughtful girl.  Daisy is anorexic.  While this is not a major theme in the novel, it comes up multiple times throughout the book.  She makes it very clear that not eating is a decision that she has made because that she enjoys the control it gives her and her thinness.  After moving to England, she becomes romantically and sexually involved with her first cousin Edward.  She knows that what she is doing is wrong, but explains that it feels right and good, and states that with the war it seems like their family connection isn’t important.  When the war tears her family apart, she become a mother figure to her nine-year-old cousin Piper, with Daisy making a conscience effort to keep Piper safe and shielded while separated from her brothers.  At the beginning of the novel, Daisy is very willing to be taken care of but by the end she works very hard to make sure she can take care of others.

All these decisions and actions make Daisy a very believable character.  Because of her flaws and strengths, young readers would be able to easily relate and connect with her.  Daisy has a variety of struggles throughout the novel that she is able to work through, such as her eating disorder and losing a loved one, which some teens would be able to sympathize with and learn from Daisy’s experiences.

While being over a decade old, the novel is very relevant to today.  Daisy’s struggles are fairly timeless (a disliked stepmother, feeling replaced by a younger sibling, feeling out of control of her own life) but the war that is occurring in the book is startling similar to the world of today, being described as

Snipers and small groups of rebels everywhere, disorganized bands of covert fighters and half the time you couldn’t tell the Good Guys from the Bad Guys and neither could they.  Buses blew up, and occasionally an office building or a post office or a school…You could ask a thousand people on seven continents what it was all about and you wouldn’t get the same answer twice; nobody really knew for sure but you could bet one or more of the following words would crop up: oil, money, land, sanctions, democracy. (176)

If police violence and ISIS were added to the causes of the war, it could easily be a description of the events of this summer.  While these parts of the war are barely described in the novel, knowing that the context of the war is so similar to our current world gives a great meaning to Daisy’s experiences. 

Activity:  

Many popular novels of today take place in a postapocalyptic future, showing the aftermath of a great war that ravaged the world.  How I Live Now tells the story of what life was like while the world became ravaged.  While Daisy’s story is nicely wrapped up, little is said about how the world around her was affected by the war.  Readers could write their own postapocalypic story explaining the effect of the war.  Alternatively, How I Live Now could be paired with a postapocalyptic book such as the Hunger Games.  Readers could write the story between the war Daisy experienced and the world Katniss lives in, developing the story to explain how the war caused the postapocalyptic world to develop. 

 Related Resources:

During the war, Daisy and her cousin Piper are taken far from their home.  When the war takes a turn for the worst, the girls attempt to return home on foot.  They spend over a week traveling on footpaths and riverbeds, eating berries, nuts and mushrooms that they find and sleeping under a plastic tarp.  Their ability to survive is due in part to a survival kit that was given to them. The following websites give instructions and supply lists for making survival kits.

American Red Cross.  Be Prepared for an Emergency.  Retrieved from http://www.redcross.org/get-help/prepare-for-emergencies/be-red-cross-ready/get-a-kit (accessed July 18, 2016)

Department of Homeland Security.  Basic Disaster Supplies Kit. Retrieved from https://www.ready.gov/kit (accessed July 18, 2016)

Blair, Patrick.  How to Make Your Own Pill Bottle Survival Kit. Retrieved from http://survivalathome.com/pill-bottle-survival-kit/ (accessed July 18, 2016)

Daisy naturally overcomes her eating disorder in the novel by realizing it is absurd for her to refuse food when people are dying of starvation.  Beyond an explanation that she doesn’t eat and she enjoys the control, little else is said about Daisy’s condition.  This website gives information about anorexia and shares information on treating the disease. 

National Eating Disorder Association.  Anorexia Nevosa.  Retrieved from https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/anorexia-nervosa (accessed July 18, 2016)

National Eating Disorder Association.  Treatment. Retrieved from https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/treatment (accessed July 18, 2016)

Published Review:

“A 15-year-old, contemporary urbanite named Daisy, sent to England to summer with relatives, falls in love with her aunt's "oldy worldy" farm and her soulful cousins--especially Edmond, with whom she forms "the world's most inappropriate case of sexual obsession." Matters veer in a startling direction when terrorists strike while Daisy's aunt is out of the country, war erupts, and soldiers divide the cousins by gender between two guardians. Determined to rejoin Edmond, Daisy and her youngest cousin embark upon a dangerous journey that brings them face to face with horrific violence and undreamt-of deprivation. Just prior to the hopeful conclusion, Rosoff introduces a jolting leap forward in time accompanied by an evocative graphic device that will undoubtedly spark lively discussions. As for the incestuous romance, Daisy and Edmond's separation for most of the novel and the obvious emotional sustenance Daisy draws from their bond sensitively shift the focus away from the relationship's implicit (and potentially discomfiting) physical dimension. More central to the potency of Rosoff's debut, though, 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.”

Mattson, Jennifer. (2004).  How I Live Now. n.p.: Booklist, 20o4. Book Index with Reviews, EBSCOhost (accessed July 17, 2016).