How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

When I was younger, books sucked me in and held me in a safe place when the world around me seemed like it was about ready to burn itself down. I could live between the pages easily, an outsider watching other peoples’ lives unnoticed, while my own life buzzed around me while I read, oblivious. Since the age twelve or thirteen, though, I’ve not been able to have quite that same relationship with my reading now that my coping mechanisms have at least somewhat improved. The relationship I have with Meg Rosoff’s novel How I Live Now is the closest I’ve come to the relationship I had with the books that I loved when I was younger and hiding from reality. The book didn’t make me feel safe at all—it was quite the opposite, but I could still live inside of it. I read it in one sitting and can’t stop thinking about it now that it’s over.

How I Live Now is a crossover novel that was originally considered standard fiction but is currently also being shelved with young adult fiction. I don’t know if I agree with the inside of my copy that says it is appropriate for ages twelve and up, but what do I know about anything? The novel shook me and made me uncomfortable and took me out of my own life in a way that was terrifying. I don’t know if my middle school self could have dealt with all of the material and the way that it was handled.

If I tried to give you a plot summary of the novel, you would gather that the main character struggled with anorexia and selfishness and cynicism but went through a coming of age in the middle of a future war where the identity of The Enemy was a big question mark and no one even knew what the war was over. You would know that book dealt with incest and the breaking of the taboo in major ways. You would know that there was a touch of magic, a splattering of telepathy, a continual string of events that were either brushes with insanity or out of body experiences that happened because of love and shared consciousness. Giving you the skeleton of the novel in the form of a basic summary would not speak to how chilling the novel was or tell you that Rosoff seems as much like a witch woman as she is a gripping author.

Honestly, I don’t know what to say about the novel at all except that you should read it. As one of my other favorite authors (Mark Haddon) says on the front cover, the novel is “Magical and utterly faultless.”

My last word on this is that Rosoff’s novel is the most original work of fiction I’ve read in a long time, or maybe in my life time. What started off seeming like it would be just another book about an angry and displaced adolescent finding their way turned into something much bigger. I realize that most of you 50 bookers are probably a lot more well read than I am and have read a lot more truly significant novels (whatever that means) than I have, but I feel like this book will probably join the ranks of revered reading and that Rosoff will find her place beside the Atwoods of the literary world over time.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

The Hanged Man by Francesca Lia Block

Francesca Lia Block has been my favorite author since I was twelve. Her books have helped me through family drama, break ups, graduating high school, moving to Boone… you name it, her writing has counseled me through it. Her style is unique, poetic, and decadent and chalk full of heady imagery. The content of her novels is often a bit dark but instead of flat out telling the reader ugly things, she insinuates them with beautiful language. Her books are always in the young adult fiction section, but I’ve never understood why, as her novels are laced with content inappropriate for children like AIDS scares and threesomes and child abuse. Her protagonists are usually strong but deeply flawed women in their late teens or early twenties, about where I’m at now, so despite having read most of them again and again I’ve started to revisit them.

Claudia just read my cards. “The Hanged Man,” she said. “Renunciation. Self-deprivation. Suspended in illusion. In the Egyptian deck, he is condemned to hang in hell eating his own waste. Self-poisoning. Also, resurrection.”

In The Hanged Man, Laurel is starving herself so that she can be childlike, so that she can look like she is too young to be touched, because her father that has just died did a little too much of that. She’s a Rose White to her best friend Claudia’s Rose Red, quiet and tame while Claudia is doing heroin and sleeping with too many men. Laurel’s mother keeps seeing white moths everywhere and thinks they are the spirit of her dead husband coming to visit her while she scrubs and scours her house, trying to get rid of the impurities that she thinks caused her husband's cancer. Laurel has a certain kind of mental strength that causes dishes to break when she’s upset without her touching them, glasses to shatter. She’s afraid that her pain brought her father’s cancer into being. During Laurel’s healing process, she meets Jack. We don’t know if he’s a man or a demon but he helps Laurel to reclaim her body and her voice and brings her and her friend Claudia together in new ways.

Each chapter is named after a tarot card and their meanings play into what Laurel is working through in each chapter. Claudia’s mother reads tarot cards for a living and Laurel is planning on designing her own deck. Each character takes on different properties and is ascribed a particular card that their face will go on when she paints them.

This is an intense and disturbing book about incest, family, recovering mother-daughter relationships, mythology, healing, urban violence, drugs, death, magic, and sex. It’s also a very short read with an insane amount packed into only 137 pages. I curled up with it on the back porch and finished it in a little over an hour.