One of the most raved-about young adult novels of the last decade just got a sexy revamp as a film tie-in edition to celebrate the release of a major film this year.
One of the most raved-about young adult novels of the last decade just got a sexy revamp as a film tie-in edition to celebrate the release of a major film this year.
Meg Rosoff's award-winning debut novel How I Live Now forms part of a burgeoning body of dystopian science fiction aimed at teenagers and young adults. It flips the traditional bildungsroman on its head for some 21st-century lessons in life, love and war.
So what are some of these lessons?
Well, 15-year-old Manhattanite Elizabeth (she prefers to be called Daisy) basically has to learn how to live all over again when her world is shaken to the core by the outbreak of a third world war.
Somewhere in a not-too-distant future conjured up by Rosoff, Daisy disembarks a plane in England, finding herself face-to-face with a cousin she's never met. A cousin who’ll change her entire life.
Self-assured and headstrong, Daisy thinks she knows everything about life and love.
But when Britain is invaded and occupied by an unnamed force and her family is scattered in different directions, she receives a difficult education.
What started as an idyllic summer holiday for Daisy and her cousins Edmond, Piper, Isaac and Osbert (and their two dogs and one goat) is shattered in an instant.
While at first the children enjoy the lawless Eden that results from the breakdown of global systems, communications and the absence of adults, the grim realities of war soon arrive on their doorstep in the form of a terrorist’s heavy, muddy boot.
While we never find out when the story is set or why the worldwide war is taking place, this doesn't seem to matter.
For you see, Daisy and Edmond have fallen in love.
The fiery tumult into which the vague (yet apocalyptic) war has thrown the young teenagers is echoed in their inner worlds, where the two young soul mates even find themselves in each other's heads.
The book is narrated in Daisy's cynical, sharp-as-a-tack teenage drawl, crackling with undercurrents of angst and desire.
Through her keen eyes we observe a world thrown into chaos by war and hormones. It’s just that, well, she’s not really that interested in the details of war…
While Rosoff does not shy away from such hard topics as graphic violence and apparent incest between these ‘kissing cousins’, this dystopian coming-of-age novel is an honest and tender look at themes of love, longing, fidelity, self-sacrifice, and the confusion of adolescence.
Written in the build-up of the Iraq war, this dystopian sci-fi might have lessons that reverberate across time and place.
Like Daisy, readers stand to learn a lot from the events that unfold in these well-crafted pages, and will come out on the other side, relatively unscathed but definitely not unchanged.
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Published by Penguin Books South Africa
Received from Penguin Books for review purposes
ISBN: 9780141318011
Recommended Price: R110
Published: July 2010
