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.
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