Book Review: How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff (2004)

Narrated by fifteen year-old New Yorker Daisy, How I Live Now takes place in Occupied Britain during a never-named-but-implied World War III.

Daisy's father and stepmother, expecting a new baby, send Daisy to England to live with cousins she has never met. Just as she is settling into her new home, Britain is infiltrated by an anonymous enemy that take advantage of Britain's absent military forces busy fighting in other parts of the world. While the country is in chaos, Daisy falls in love with her cousin Edmond, whom she seems to have an almost telepathic relationship with.

Daisy and her cousins are evacuated, leaving Daisy and her youngest cousin Piper - seperated from her brothers - desperate to get back to their comfortable farmhouse, where the war once seemed far, far away.

The novel's present-day war is evocative and thought-provoking. Daisy is a strong protagonist who quickly adapts to her new surroundings - surroundings that the novel's typical readership would likely be unfamiliar with. Similarily, a romance between cousins is an unusual storyline for a coming-of-age novel. These differences make How I Live Now stand out amongst young adult romance novels and stories that end happily ever after.

How I Live Now is convincingly youthful in its language, description and dialogue. However, the frequent use of run-on sentences quickly exhaust the reader. Daisy does not seem to verbally mature throughout the novel and though we are led to believe that her story is a memoir, Rosoff's writing style is inconsistant with a character that has struggled, physically and mentally, through her teenage years. Daisy sounds much younger than expected and though her actions suggest she matures quickly, her narration does not. The long-winded paragraphs make the reader feel like they are always moving at too quick a pace. This is true even in quiet moments when Daisy is relaxing by the river with her cousins prior to the evacuation. Though they occasionally enhance moments of tension, they ruin the peaceful tone of other scenes.

The concluding chapters felt rough, as if added at the last minute because there was nothing more to be gleaned from the story - but there was. I wanted to know more about what happened after the war, about how the country began to repair itself. Six years pass between part one and part two, and the events of these six years are crammed into less than four pages.

Overall, How I Live Now is an engaging read for a young adult looking to escape the world of the Jonas Brothers and discover something gritty, real, and mysterious. The exhaustive extended sentences and rushed conclusion are not distracting enough to take away from the vivid setting and honest merit of this novel.

Cross-Platform... What is it?

I've just completed a cross-platform unit for my degree and thought I might pass on some information to those of you who are unfamiliar with the term. Cross-platform covers four basic areas of media: online, text, audio and video. By combining these four things in any arrangement, you can make a series/project/game that spans multiple platforms and therefore inspires interactivity or action from the audience. For example, a TV show might have a series on television, a website with extra clips or webisodes, and maybe it also has some playing cards you can collect by buying a related magazine. By targeting your audience through a variety of mediums, you can keep their attention on your topic and provide them with ways to interact with the subject that would not have been possible even twenty years ago.

Cross-platform is quickly emerging as a media force to be reckoned with. TV shows are increasingly introducing related websites, children can play games with their favourite characters from the TV online, and audio, video and text are being used to make topics more user-friendly and widely available.

I worked with a great group of people: two producers, two directors, an editor, another screenwriter, and a radio producer all on Masters courses. We put our heads together and created an interactive website for children between the ages of 5-7. It incorporated those four things I listed above - audio, video, online and text. We did some market research and thought about merchandise and marketing, we built a mock-up of our website, and we presented to a panel of professors and a visiting media professional who has worked with BBC Raw and Cbeebies. The feedback we received was very positive and personally I had a lot of fun considering all the options available to us once we stepped out of the boundaries of single-platform media.

Cross-platform is not only about being different and thinking outside the media box, it's also about making your project accessible and helping your ideas adapt to a changing market and advancing technology. In fact, it's not just the technology that's advancing - it's your audience, too. These days, children begin surfing the internet (usually supervised) at about 5 years old! It's information like this that cross-platform media takes advantage of.

Think about a project you're currently working on. Could it be expanded to include another kind of media? While I don't believe cross-platform media will take over single platform media anytime soon, keeping up with the advancements in entertainment and technology is never a bad thing!