Review: How I Live Now

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I read this book in a single day, so obviously it's a page-turner. It's really in my long-standing favorite genre, post-apocalyptic fiction, but it starts out pretending (sort of) to be ordinary realistic fiction.

The apocalypse in question felt a little iffy to me -- it was plenty terrible, but it seemed a little too flat, somehow. It reminded me of the post-apocalypse worlds I used to try to invent for my stories when I was a young teenager. Meg Rosoff is a much, much better writer than I was, obviously; *everything* about my writing was flat and a bit derivative, and her characters and their relationships are real and deep and fresh. They feel real from the very beginning because she's combined some unusual elements in each of the main characters; it gives them a sort of "you couldn't make this up" feel, without being gimmicky.

In the way the story is told, the book is entirely too realistic for my taste. It feels a little like the rough draft of a memoir; there are some threads that get dropped and never picked back up, and many that Daisy, the narrator, picks back up but can't properly explain, either because she doesn't know enough or because she doesn't have the time. To me, this makes the ending feel rushed and a bit unsatisfying. But I think this so often that I've been told it's a problem with me, not the books I read, and I suspect that's the case here; I'm certainly more satisfied than usual with the ending.



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