Module 5 * Other Award Winners * Feb. 9-16

How I Live Now

by

Meg Rosoff

Bibliography: Rosoff, M. (2004). How I live now. New York,   
          NY:Wendy Lamb Books.

Summary: Daisy is a sad character.  She is sent to England to live with family she doesn't know because her evil stepmother wants her out of the way.  She also has an eating disorder.  The family she meets when she gets to England is an odd bunch.  The mother works in politics and is trying to help with tension between countries and stop war.  The kids are all somewhat psychic and very quirky.  After the mother leaves on a business trip, Daisy and her cousin Edmond end up falling in love and engaging in a sexual relationship that they try to hide from his older and younger siblings.  As things get more serious war breaks out.  The mother does not come back so the kids are on their own.  They are doing well when the army takes their house and splits the girls up from the boys, sending them to other cities and families.  They survive horrible but typical war happenings until Daisy is "rescued" near the war's end by her father and sent to a hospital back home in the states.  She is there for years, but finally gets back to the cousins in England to find them all changed by what they have seen and done.  However, she stays and get her happy(ish) ending with the new Edmond.

My Take:  I think it is intersting how vague the author makes the details about the war.  We don't know who it is between, how it started, how it ended or how any part of the world outside of this family's is fairing.  I know that is how it was for this family, but it was irritating for me.  I wanted the adult details!  I wasn't even sure if this book was set in the present, past or future for a while!  I loved the story and the characters, but would have liked more information about the characters, how they came to have their "talents"  and how those "talents" affected their lives (as well as war information).  I don't want you to think I didn't like the book, because I definitely did!  I am just being greedy, wanting more about the characters I grew to care about.  This book was made into a movie in the UK and I am interested to see it.

Reviews: 

Gr 8 Up-Daisy, 15, a troubled New York City teen with a distant father, a wicked (and pregnant) stepmother, and an eating disorder, is sent to England to stay on a rambling farm with her deceased mother's sister's family. It is made up of Aunt Penn "who always has Important Work To Do Related to the Peace Process" and her brood of children: Osbert, 16; 14-year-old twins Isaac and Edmond; and 9-year-old Piper. As the kids spend more and more time together, Daisy warms to them, beginning to tnne in to a seemingly psychic bond that the siblings share. When Aunt Penn travels to Oslo, Daisy begins a sexual relationship with Edmond. At the same time, hostile forces invade England. Originally enjoying the freedom of a world that seems to have forgotten them, the cousins are inevitably separated, leaving Piper and Daisy to struggle across the countryside and rejoin the others. Daisy's voice is uneven, being at times teenage vapid, while elsewhere sporting a vocabulary rich with 50-cent words, phrases, and references. In addition, Rosoff barely scratches the surface of the material at hand. At times, this is both intentional and effective (the enemy is never named) but for the most part the dearth of explanation creates insurmountable questions around the basic mechanisms of the plot. There is no explanation of how a small force could take out all communications (including cell phones) and proceed to overrun and to control an entire country. Perhaps even stranger, the ramifications of psychic abilities and underage sexual relationships between first cousins is never addressed.

Davey, D. (2004). How I live now (review). School Library Journal, 50(9), 216.

Gr 8 Up-Anorexic Daisy, a miserable, quirkily perceptive 15-year-old New Yorker, is sent to live with British cousins whose mom is off on a peace mission. An idyllic adventure becomes more intense as Daisy and her cousin Edmond develop a deep but also physical relationship. During her stay, unidentified terrorists attack England, global war ensues, and the cousins are separated. Privation and growth necessitated by crisis move Daisy past anorexia into wisdom, and love changes her-and possibly her readers-perspectives forever.

Hoffman, M. (2005). How I live now (review). School Library Journal, 51(11), 60.

Use in a School Library: This book would be a good one to use as a study on war- the realism of the atrocities and difficulties on those left at home would be interesting to teach, but I would be wary of using it with any but upper senior high schoolers because of the incestual sex angle. 

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Looking for Alaska 

by 

John Green

Bibliography: Green, J. (2005). Looking for Alaska. New York, NY: Speak.

Summary: Miles' life is sad and boring.  So he decides to reinvent himself at boarding school in Alabama, the same boarding school his father went to, the same school he has heard his father tell fun stories about.  When he arrives at school, all goes pretty much according to plan.  Miles (Pudge to his friends) makes great friends with his room mate, Chip (the Colonel) and his friends, which include the moody and unpredictale Alaska, whom he instantly falls in love with. They do all the great things that Miles heard his dad talk about (one later in the book is done with dad's help!), and life is as good as it can be- until Alaska makes a decision that changes all of their lives forever- and the rest are left to cope and somehow move on.

My Take: I like how this book is divided into chapters filled with gettin-to-know-you stories and adventures that are numbered by how many days are left leading up to the major event, and then numbered by the days after it as they try to make sense of it and pick up the pieces.  It keeps your attention without having big stand-out moments (besides the one), but lots of small, real-life boarding school escapades and friendship moments.  You are always aware that something big is coming because of how the chapters are numbered.  You see it coming and wish you could stop it...

Reviews: 

Editor’s note: When John Green published Looking for Alaska, which would go on to win the 2006 Michael L. Printz Award, he was working at Booklist as a production editor. It is Booklist policy that a book written or edited by a staff editor receive a brief descriptive announcement rather than a review.
Green’s first novel tells the story of 11th-grader Miles Halter, who leaves his boring life in Florida in hopes of boarding school adventures in Alabama. A collector of famous last words, Miles is after what the dying Francois Rabelais called “the Great Perhaps.” At the boarding school, he is blessed with a fast-talking and quick-witted roommate, who just so happens to be friends with the enigmatic and beautiful Alaska Young. It’s Alaska who introduces Miles to the purported last words of Simon Bolivar: “Damn it. How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?” It is a question that haunts Miles, particularly in the last third of the novel as he and his friends are forced to cope with loss.

Hunt, J.  (2010) Looking for Alaska (review). Booklist Online, July 19, 2006.

Grade 9 Up - Sixteen-year-old Miles Halter's adolescence has been one long nonevent - no challenge, no girls, no mischief, and no real friends. Seeking what Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps," he leaves Florida for a boarding school in Birmingham, AL. His roommate, Chip, is a dirt-poor genius scholarship student with a Napoleon complex who lives to one-up the school's rich preppies. Chip's best friend is Alaska Young, with whom Miles and every other male in her orbit falls instantly in love. She is literate, articulate, and beautiful, and she exhibits a reckless combination of adventurous and self-destructive behavior. She and Chip teach Miles to drink, smoke, and plot elaborate pranks. Alaska's story unfolds in all-night bull sessions, and the depth of her unhappiness becomes obvious. Green's dialogue is crisp, especially between Miles and Chip. His descriptions and Miles's inner monologues can be philosophically dense, but are well within the comprehension of sensitive teen readers. The chapters of the novel are headed by a number of days "before" and "after" what readers surmise is Alaska's suicide. These placeholders sustain the mood of possibility and foreboding, and the story moves methodically to its ambiguous climax. The language and sexual situations are aptly and realistically drawn, but sophisticated in nature. Miles's narration is alive with sweet, self-deprecating humor, and his obvious struggle to tell the story truthfully adds to his believability. Like Phineas in John Knowles's A Separate Peace(S & S, 1960), Green draws Alaska so lovingly, in self-loathing darkness as well as energetic light, that readers mourn her loss along with her friends.

Lewis, J. (2009). Looking for Alaska (review). School Library Journal, 51(2), 136.  

Use in a School Library: I am really not good at coming up with ways to use these more mature books in a school library.  This would obviously be good to use in a display with other Printz award winners.  It is a moving story that teaches a good lesson- in between the sex and drinking!  The characters and problems are real and older students would easily identify with the book, even if they had never been to boarding school.