“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Penguin Books (2005)
211 pages

I can’t make up my mind about this book. I think I like it. I can’t pinpoint what I don’t like, but I can’t say what it was about the book that I loved either.

Daisy is a troubled fifteen-year-old girl, sent from New York to England to live with her aunt and her four cousins — all of whom she’s never met. She’s met at the airport by her fourteen-year-old, smoking, driving, evading-paying-for-the-parking cousin Edmond, and immediately feels a special connection with him. She loves it in England, the idyllic countryside and kind Aunt Penn telling her of the mother she never knew, and her cousins, sweet and warm, especially little Piper, and of course Edmond. Inexplicably, the war that everyone says will not happen strikes, and with Aunt Penn away, the children have to fend for themselves.

The book is in first person, Daisy’s point of view. The lack of punctuation threw me off when I started — no quote marks for speech is still OK in my book, but when even commas go missing it kinda sends my sensibilities into a spin. But after a while I kept hearing a voice in my head reading the lines, and it’s not my voice anymore — it sounds like a girl telling a story and not pausing often enough instead of me reading about characters in the story. Huh, I suppose I’m not making sense. It’s like . . . well, not any of my younger sisters; when they speak the words almost tumble over each other because they’re speaking very fast — it’s a family characteristic; I do it too — but they pause at the appropriate places, so not like them. Maybe like some of their friends, speaking in those breathless sentences teenage girls sometimes do. Sometimes I half-expected thewordstorunontogether, that’s how some parts of the book sounded to me.

Otherwise, the descriptions are almost lyrical and dreamy at times, and careless and painfully honest at other points. The feelings of the characters are tangible and shine through the narrative — the worry and the pain and the loneliness and the love they feel for each other.

While the ending itself wasn’t abrupt, but the shift between Part One and Part Two was. It sort of stopped me in my tracks, and I had to go back a few pages, just to make sure I wasn’t missing a few pages or something. Even the tone of the book changes after Part One, and after complaining about not having enough commas, I was struggling to get used of them being in the right places.

I enjoyed reading How I Live Now. It was haunting — I kept thinking about it after I had finished the book — even if I still can’t fully make up my mind if I liked it or not. I won’t have any hesitations picking up any of Meg Rosoff’s newer books after this, missing punctuation notwithstanding.

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