How I Live Now

How I Live Now by Meg Roshoff is a treasure that I had not expected to find. There was always a copy or two at the bookshop's biannual sale - I noticed because I love those Penguin Classic covers. I had seen it but never really noticed it. When someone brought it to bookclub, I was intrigued when she described it as an apocalyptic novel that has resonances with WWII Britain.

The main character is your typical (literary) neurotic American teenage girl - typical only in the sense that she reminds me of other characters in other novels bravely fighting wicked stepmothers and half-sisters and fathers who just don't notice them. She is sent to Britain in the face of a pending war to live with her aunt and cousins on a farm. Just when she thinks she has found herself in the Garden of Eden, war breaks out and the cousins are separated. She has to find a way to come to terms with the ways in which war has changed her life while trying to escape back to the rest of her family.

The book is ostensibly set in the present or the future - the main character has a cellphone, although it can't get a signal. But this is really the only clue. Otherwise, this setting has the feel of a Blyton-esque country idyll. In addition, the war does not involve nuclear weapons at all, only 'ordinary' bombs, which makes one wonder whether these kids are stuck in a time warp, and are in fact victims of WWII. These kinds of questions define the spirit of Roshoff's novel. It is passionate and unsettling; it pulls you in like mud, except you're more than happy to sit there, all soggy and cold.

I'm still puzzling over the ending, though. At the beginning of the novel, the main character hints that she and her cousins somehow bring the chaos on themselves. This becomes clearer at the end, but is more an expression of guilt than of reality. But then, that last chapter...