How I Live Now

Finally got around to reading How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff to see what all the buzz is about. I am very conflicted about this one.  I can certainly see how it's found its passionate followers, and I definitely enjoyed it. I went back and forth about the way the author did the dialog, without any quotation marks, using odd capitalization, etc. I guess it made the narration more authentic and put less of a distance between the reader and the story.

But that is getting into the details before I even touch the heart of the story. I admit to being both intrigued by and shaken by books that have catastrophic events in the current or not-too-distant future -- the other one that comes to mind is Life as We Knew It. I couldn't even finish its sequel, The Dead and the Gone. I think that the parent side of me has a really hard time reading something that could reflect my child's future. When you read stories set in the past, say during World War II, we know that the war did end, or you can have some hope that we won't repeat some of these horrors, even if that's not what history seems to tell us. But when I read stories that could happen in the future, I get bogged down in the fear of what could come in the future for my own child. It seems strange in a way that the fictional stories are more frightening to me than the true stories, given how awful some of those true stories are. Of course, one of the books I just read was Never Fall Down, which is full of gruesome wartime events. But you know going in that the main character, whose life the story is based on, lives. And in the course of the book he has such an incredible ability to rise above things. He says several times that he was lucky, but I think his story is an example of someone who really made his own luck.

Back to How I Live Now.  Of course elements of it remind me a lot of all those British orphan stories -- or stories in which adults play only the most peripheral roles: the kids figure all sorts of things out on their own, deep in the English countryside in a verdant, timeless setting. It also made me think of Numbers, which has a love story between troubled teens crashing through British villages and fields, escaping from adults who don't understand them, against a backdrop of fears of international terrorism. It also made me reflect back on Goodnight Mister Tom. The latter is a modern-day classic in England but not well known in the states. It is set during WWII and involves a young boy who is sent out of London to the relative safety of the country. It turns out that the real threat to the boy is not the bombs being dropped by the Germans but his twisted mother. So he is fleeing bad family relationships like Daisy, going to the English countryside where he discovers sanctuary, more from the relationships he builds than from the place itself.