How I Live Now

This young adult novel by Meg Rosoff is set in the war which is about to happen, which is an interesting idea - ie, bombs falling on London and from there a war starting up without any identification of who the baddies are. It's a war which is similar to the way people imagine war in Iraq, Afghanistan etc - confused, chaotic, ever-changing, and the idea is, I suppose, to set it in a place where you can't quite imagine it happening (England). The young protagonist is a cynical teen from New York shoved into a lovely farmhouse in country England, and she falls in love with it all, esp her first cousin, Edmund. The aunt leaves early on, and after that the war comes along, and it would be all very exciting, except that everything happens off-camera - the love (and sex, thank goodness it's off camera I suppose), the war, all of it. We're told about it, we hear it, but we don't see much in this story - I felt like I was groping blindly around. It's full of original ideas and it's clever, but I think it's hard to have a first-person story without the right details, and perhaps Meg Rosoff can't quite imagine the right details - she's got the little kid Ding down pat, but war and agony? I don't think so. It's an interesting book, and it will make you think, but it misses out on being great, like say Z for Zechariah is.

How I am living now has changed remarkably from my last review - I've moved twice since then - and I'm no longer housesitting but living in a small granny flat at the back of someone's house - a colleague of my father's. The horror of trying to find adequate accommodation in Sydney needs a whole novel to itself, with Real Estate agents as the enemies (refusing to return calls or help you at all), and the setting the filthy rooms offered to people who aren't earning so much, with boarded up windows and holes in the walls. No one deserves to be offered that as housing.