How I Live Now is in every Waterstones in the country on those little tables selling the best of teen fiction in three different editions. Waterstones, I trusted you. You betrayed that trust.
How I Live Now is a book about World War III. An American teenage girl, Daisy, goes to England and gets stuck there for the war. It's basically her story.
I did not like this book.
It was boring and lengthy. It had the typical characteristic of a Meg Rosoff novel of being quite short but it feels like it goes on forever. The beginning was good, the end was rushed and how the middle dragged on. The plot was stretched out when really the basic premise wasn't that good anyway.
Now there is something very famous about this book that I had an issue with (semi-spoiler ahead). Daisy falls in love with her cousin. It is not cute. It is not a good love plot. It is incestuous and weird and you have practically the same dna stop. Eugh why would you write a love story between cousins. There is a stigma there but that is because you have the same DNA.
The book was gory. Horribly so. That was definitely a negative. I know war is awful but seriously Meg Rosoff could have just made up a complicated metaphor you did not need to try and shock me. It just took away from the book that I already didn't like.
I hated Daisy as a character. She was annoying and spoilt and delusioned. I felt like she was an image of a teenage thrust upon my by a woman without teenagers. I felt like she was a child in a teenagers body but with anger and hormones. "But isn't that what a teenager is?" No. We are far more complicated than a 2D drawing. We are not Daisy. Her anger was annoying and I just ended up with
no compassion for her.
*trigger warning* (spoilers) Daisy has an eating disorder throughout the book. I found this far too subtle and again, overly two dimentional. She should have been more frequent with the references or
open. Ok trigger over.
Overall it was two stars. Almost one.
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