How I Live Now

by Meg Rosoff

[Nessa Luna]

Read this review, and many more on my blog October Tune!

Honestly, after seeing the trailer (of the movie based on this book) I thought the book might be good. I had tried reading it before, but I thought my ebook version was a bit weird, because the dialogue was all wibbly-wobbly. But it turned out that the dialogue was actually written like that. No quotation marks, no commas to indicate where the dialogue started and stopped (well sometimes there was), nothing.

The way the story was written, with Daisy telling that she was going to write down how the war changed her life, reminded me a bit of Tomorrow When the War Began (and also with the whole unknown enemy thing); but that was probably just a coincidence. I liked the story, apart from the whole incest thing. Really, why do people think that it’s a good idea to write about incest? Why? If you want your main character to fall in love with someone, you can just make up that they’re a friend of your cousin, not your cousin! They’re fictional, anything is possible! You can make up anything! Okay, of course, they can make up that their main character fell in love with their cousin but why?!

A lot of things were quite unclear to me, for example there was this conversation between Daisy and Major McEvoy, and then she said something like ‘eleven letters starting with E’, and I spend the rest of the book trying to think of an eleven lettered word that started with an E. It was probably mentioned before in the book, but who remembers every word mentioned in a book? That’s right, no one.
There was also a part where someone (I’m not gonna mention names, because spoilers) was shot, and this other guy started getting out of the car, and apparently, he was shot too. I had to read that part THREE times before I understood what happened. At first, I just thought they drove off without the second guy, but it turned out he had died as well.

I told myself I’d read fifty pages, and see if it had improved after that. It didn’t, but I read on because I’m like that (I don’t like leaving books unfinished). At the end, Daisy got a phone call from someone, and then apparently ‘part zero’ ended, because after that we got ‘part one’ (it might have been that my e-book was wibbly-wobbly and part one was actually supposed to be called part two, but I have no idea). Part one was written a lot better than the rest of the book, with proper quotation marks, because apparently Daisy was a grown-up now and grown-ups write properly. Honestly, if the book had been written better, and if they hadn’t included the whole incest thing, I might have liked the book more. Books about wars (fictional or non-fictional ones) have always interested me, but this one was actually a bit ‘boring’ (not very action packed until I was at page eighty or so). I’m just really a fan of action-packet stories.

Still, I’m glad I read the book, because then I’ll probably understand the movie a bit better (If they ever decide to play it in the Netherlands, because IMDb hasn’t got a Dutch date, hmpff).