Review: How I Live Now

How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff, is a lovely little British novel by a lovely little British lady. Despite all that lovely little Britiness, it's solidly a part of the genre we like to call War Stories.

How I Live Now (HILN) is the story of an anorexic girl named Daisy, who is punted to England to live with her aunt and cousins when her stepmother becomes too awful to bear. While there, she becomes very close with her younger cousin Piper, marvels over the strange abilities of her cousin Isaac, is largely indifferent to Oswald, her oldest cousin, and falls In Love with her cousin Edmond.

That's right.

Cousin Love.

In England.

For some reason, though, it never becomes Truly Creepy. It just hovers at Slightly Disturbing If You Actually Think About It.

Then, in the midst of all this Cousin Bonding and Non-Creepy Cousin Love, a war explodes. Basically, Britain's main army has been lured out of the country for various reasons, and now another country or organization (who is carefully never named or identified, besides as being Not British) is not letting them back in.

!!!

WHO KNEW WAR WAS THAT SIMPLE!

Not me, that's for sure.

After brushing off that stunning tactical achievement, we are presented with the Splitting Up of the cousins: Girls with girls, boys with boys.

After various physically and emotionally harrowing adventures, the book does end fairly happy, but I will warn you:

This is not exactly a feel good read.

There are mass murders. They are gory, and awful, and heartbreaking.

There is a LOT of emotional damage, also, and the book does make a pretty good case for how hard it is for people to heal after wars.

My biggest problem with the book was that it was written very freely, without a lot of grammar. So there are run-on sentences that go on FOREVER. Even when the writing is really gorgeously (or gorily) descriptive, sometimes the odd structure can make your head a little grumbly. If you could relax, it flowed very nicely, but when just reading for a couple of minutes, it was kind of distracting.

In short, it was good. Bit of a hard read, due to Murder and Bad Sentence Structure (oops, meant Free, Loose, Poetic, Blah Blah Blah).

Avoid if even the slightest whiff of incest is really disgusting to you.

Sending kissing cousins your way,

Yours truly,

Radical