How I Live Now – Meg Rosoff

     New Yorker Daisy is sent to live with her cousins in England when her issues become too much for her father and pregnant step mother to handle. Daisy tends to keep to herself so her aunt and cousins don’t judge her (to her perspective) for not eating or send her away like her stepmother has. A few days later her aunt is called away to a conference, leaving the kids in the care of the oldest cousin. The cousins are Osbert, who is the oldest at 17 and the most normal; Isaac and Edmund, 14 and both have telepathic abilities, one with animals and one with people; and Piper is the youngest and the only girl, she has the same abilities as her brothers except with both animals and people; Daisy is 15 and the protagonist, she has an eating disorder that features somewhat prominently. Not long after Daisy’s aunt departs for Oslo, several major cities are attacked and Britain is taken over by occupying forces. As Osbert becomes involved in the local defense, the younger children are left more and more to themselves. They continue their routine of collecting rations and news from the village and try not to panic the rest of the time. During this period, Edmund and Daisy start carry on a sexual relationship. Their living situation is eventually found out when the defense forces take over their home and separate the “children” and send them off to live adults in various controlled, refugee communities. The twins are sent to one farm, the girls to another and Osbert joins the soldiers (and that is pretty much the only time he is involved in the story). When the girls’ refugee community is attacked and overrun, the girls escape and try to make their way back to the only place and only people Daisy considers home and family.

     No I couldn’t have made that any longer without putting a few major spoilers in there. It is written from the point of view of Daisy and it feels that a teenager wrote it. Her thoughts are spot on and her general disregard for adults who are not immediately important is very typical of what it’s like to be a teenager. I’ve seen a lot of reviews trash the novel because of the cousin sex thing but seriously? It’s not graphic at all and it happens all the time even without the added pressures of war and doubting you’ll live to see your next birthday. The Movie version changes things up a little bit. Edmund is a bit older and not a twin, the oldest brother is taken out completely, and they add a friend for Isaac. They also leave out the epilogue and change the timing of minor events. The thing is the movie is brutal; character deaths galore. Almost no one essential to Daisy’s world dies in the book; that’s not to say other messed up things don’t happen, but death? Not so much. They also downplay the telepathy and give Daisy a nasty case of OCD and a germ phobia to go along with her anorexia. Both versions have their good sides and bad sides. I thought they were phenomenally well done. It’s been about a month since I’ve read the book and I can’t stop thinking about what I would do in such a situation. I’m finding that other books just can’t keep my attention because I keep comparing them to How I Live Now. 

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane – Katherine Howe

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane flips back and forth between modern Massachusetts and the Salem Witch Trials. When Connie’s mother calls and asks her to clean out her grandmother’s old house so it can be repossessed, Connie, a doctoral candidate, gives up her summer to clean out the old house. Connie discovers an old bible with a key and a note with the words “deliverance dane” inside of it. Weird things start happening and her advisor starts acting strange and now Connie has to figure out what is going on. 

This book is hard to recommend in all honesty. The main character struck me as terribly incompetent for who she was supposed to be. She was a doctoral candidate in colonial history who seemed to know nothing of her family from that era, how to research anything or even realize that most people of the time were functionally illiterate and often spelled things phonetically. Plus some things just didn’t make sense. Connie’s mother owned a house since Connie was four or five, was a single mother, and didn’t mention it once or pay taxes on it for 20 plus years and it’s only being repossessed now? Connie’s weird, obsessed advisor/professor taught her for at least two years and didn’t see fit to even hint that Connie should look into her family history during the time period she was supposed to be an expert in yet knew all about it? Seriously, can we say psycho stalker? Connie dates a guy for about a month and suddenly he’s “cursed” and some random recipe in her many times great grandmother’s book is the only thing that can save him, really? It started out as a decent contemporary fiction novel and then tries to become a paranormal thriller. The transition did not work very well. There were so many other places the author could’ve taken the story. The flash backs to the colonial era were interesting but that’s about all I can say this book had going for it. All in all it just comes down to the fact that the characters are unlikeable and nonsensical and it really diminishes the storytelling for me. Library rental at best. 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

This book is one I read over and over growing up. I’m going to take a moment to sound terribly cliché, coming of age story, fabulous writing, good storytelling, timeless classic. Now for why’s of all that. This book was written in a time (1943 for any one who’s curious) when there was a lot of competition so to be a good book the writing and story had to be done well. I reread it because I wanted to see if it still held the same allure for me as it did when I was a kid. It does.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is about a little girl growing up in Brooklyn during the Great Depression with a little bit of how her parents’ relationship started thrown in. I always felt a little bit like Francie. Few friends, a love of reading, siblings to take care of: any wonder I identified with the main character? The part that sticks with me most is the ending. After growing up impoverished, starting work at 14, having to delay her education, and disappointments in love; the author does not wave her magic wand and give Francie a happy ending. She does give Francie the tools to find a happy ending: intelligence, pride, ambition, and a bullheaded determination to earn what she knows will make her life worth while.

While I have your attention: this book is also semi-autobiographical. Francie may not exist but the woman who wrote this book grew up poor during the Great Depression in the same neighborhood she based this book on. There aren’t many people left who can give us an accurate personal picture of what it was like during that time. This is as close as many of us will get to understanding what life was like 80 years ago.