Meg Rosoff

1958 • Boston, Massachusetts

Writer

Meg Rosoff made a remarkable debut as a fiction writer with her 2004 novel for young adults, How I Live Now. It won several awards, and reviewers recommended it as a suitable book for adult readers, too. The story takes place in a war-ravaged England of the present day or near future and follows the adventures of Daisy, an American teenager who has come to stay with her British cousins. War breaks out not long after she arrives, and an unnamed foreign army occupies England. Later, the cousins must separate, and Daisy struggles to keep both her and her young cousin alive on a dangerous trek back to the family farm. "Rarely does a writer come up with a first novel so assured, so powerful and engaging that you can be pretty sure that you will want to read everything that this author is capable of writing," remarked critic Geraldine Bedell. "But that is what has happened with Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now, which, even before publication, is being talked of as a likely future classic."

Uneasy in suburbia

Rosoff was born in the late 1950s in Boston, Massachusetts. Her family was of Ashkenazi heritage, the segment of the Jewish diaspora (the mass dispersion of the Jews from their ancestral homeland of ancient Israel) who settled in eastern and central Europe. Her father, a surgeon, taught medicine at Harvard University, while Rosoff's mother was a psychiatric social worker. They lived in the Boston suburb of Newton, where Rosoff became a bookworm at an early age. "I knew my calling was writing at six or seven," she recalled in an interview with Meg McCaffrey in School Library Journal. "Throughout my life, everyone would say, 'You should write a novel.' But, you know, I was never good at plot."

"Teens may feel that they have experienced a war themselves as they vicariously witness Daisy's worst nightmares .... Readers will emerge from the rubble much shaken."

Publishers Weekly review of How I Live Now

Rosoff was a self-described outcast in her teens, with curly hair when the fashion was for long and straight, and unathletic in a suburban setting where playing sports like tennis was a social obligation. "I was quite an uncomfortable teenager, very unattractive and looking for love," she recalled in an interview with Benedicte Page for Bookseller. In high school, she applied to Princeton University for college, but was turned down for admission, and so she entered Harvard University instead, where she majored in English and fine arts. Even there, she told Page, she felt like an outsider. "I hated that smug, 'We are Harvard and we are the best' attitude," she said in the Bookseller interview.

Rosoff was happier when she took some time off from her Harvard studies to live in England and take classes at Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design, a prestigious art school in London. She eventually returned to the United States, finished her degree, and settled in New York City, "and succumbed [gave in] to the fate of all bookish, over-educated girls: the Publishing Job," she joked in an article she wrote for London's Guardian newspaper. The piece chronicled her unhappy career experiences before she decided to write a novel: she was fired from her second job, spent two years at People magazine, and moved on to the New York Times with her former People boss. After that, she left journalism and publishing for the advertising world and spent fifteen years as a copywriter, both in New York City and then in London, to which she returned permanently in the late 1980s. But she rarely stayed at one company for very long. "I kept losing my job, mostly for being mouthy," she confessed to Guardian writer Julia Eccleshare. "I sounded off about everything."

Tragedy prompts career change

By 2001, Rosoff had married a painter—whom she had met during her first week in England in 1989—had a daughter, and was living in North London. She still worked, but asked for some time off from her job after her younger sister, Debby, died of breast cancer. She had an idea to write fiction, though she was unsure of how to do it. "I didn't know anything about writing a novel although I've been a fanatical reader all my life," she told Sunday Times journalist Amanda Craig. "I was used to writing what I thought were brilliant ads and then having a test-panel of housewives say they didn't like them."

As a kid, Rosoff had loved novels and stories about teenage girls and their beloved horses, and so she wrote a similar tale in the summer of 2002 and sent it to a literary-agent friend of her husband's. The agent passed on the story but asked to meet with Rosoff and suggested that she think about a different topic for her fiction. In the taxi on the way to that meeting, Rosoff came up with the idea for what became How I Live Now. "I was so grateful and so terrified, I wanted to impress her so much," Rosoff said to Bookseller. "And right on the way into lunch, I had this idea for a mad, eccentric family and their cousin who comes to live with them." The agent encouraged her to go ahead and start the project, but as Rosoff recalled in another interview, she was still unsure about how to do this. "What are the rules for writing a young adult novel?" she recalled asking the agent. "She told me there were no rules."

Three months later, Rosoff had completed the first draft of How I Live Now. Some of the wartime details were borrowed indirectly from the tales she heard from older Britons about their experiences during World War II (1939–45; war in which Great Britain, France, the United States, and their allies defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan). Other ideas were taken from present-day events, as British citizens grew nervous as United Kingdom forces readied to join a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in early 2003 (U.S. president George W. Bush [1946–] and members of his administration believed that Saddam Hussein's regime harbored weapons of mass destruction, and may have even aided al-Qaeda at some point before that group's terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001. The United Nations asked to see proof of this before permitting an invasion, but many leaders of other European nations were suspicious of the evidence presented.) The work was published by Penguin/Puffin Books in England in mid-2004, and in August of the same year in the United States by an imprint of Random House.

Novel set in wartime chaos

Rosoff's unlikely heroine is Daisy, a jaded New York City teen who has been treated for an eating disorder. Her mother died while giving birth to her, and her father has remarried. Daisy's stepmother, whom she calls Davina the Diabolical, is pregnant, and as the due-date nears, Daisy's father suggests a visit to meet her cousins from her mother's side in England—a plan clearly designed to get her out of the way. As the novel begins Daisy arrives to stay with her Aunt Penn, her mother's sister, and her four cousins. They live on a large rural property with goats and dogs and are a self-sufficient bunch unofficially headed by Obsert, the eldest boy. Next are twins, Edmond and Isaac, and a bossy nine-year-old girl named Piper. Daisy quickly notices that they all seem to be able to read one another's minds. Aunt Penn leaves them alone when she travels to Norway to participate in a peace conference organized with the hope of preventing an international political crisis, but one day bombs rock London. Aunt Penn is stranded in the Scandinavian country as England is occupied by an unnamed enemy army.

Daisy and Edmond, meanwhile, have fallen in love and are conducting a passionate love affair on the sly. The British Army seizes Aunt Penn's house, and Daisy and Piper are sent off to live with a farm family some distance away, while another place is found for the three boys. In time, a civilian uprising breaks out, and the occupying army reacts swiftly and begins to terrorize the countryside in its door-to-door search for insurgents. The girls are helped by kindly British soldiers and allowed to stay in army barracks, but when the enemy moves closer, Daisy and Piper flee into the woods. Daisy knows that Edmond and his brothers are at a place called Gateshead Farm, and she and Piper set out to make their way there on foot.

Thanks to Piper's knowledge of edible plants, the girls are able to stretch their army food-supply kit provisions until they come upon the river they know will take them to the Gateshead Farm. They find a horrific scene there, with dozens of corpses littering the landscape, and decide to return to Aunt Penn's house. There, they survive on the last remnants of the crops, and Daisy realizes that she has conquered the eating disorder—more an expression of her stubborn personality and unhappy home life, she freely admits—that had sent her into psychiatric care in her prior, pre-war life in New York. "One funny thing was that I didn't look much different now from the day I arrived in England," Daisy reflects, "but the difference was that now I ate what I could. Somewhere along the line I'd lost the will not to eat....The idea of wanting to be thin in a world full of people dying from lack of good struck even me as stupid."

Story reveals home hardships

Though many of the political details of the war are unclear, there is a slow unfolding of events that serves to show how it came to affect the lives of Daisy and her cousins. Having to leave pets behind when their home is taken over by the British Army is just one detail. "I wanted readers to know what it was like to live through a war because I wanted them to get past the 'over there' syndrome," Rosoff explained to Ilene Cooper in a Booklist article. "There's such a tendency to look at people who aren't like you and think they don't suffer the way you do. The best letter I received was from a girl who said, 'Your book made me realize what it was like to live in a country where there's war.' That's exactly what I set out to do."

How I Live Now won two notable honors: the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in the United Kingdom, and the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in literature for young adults from the American Library Association. Rosoff's debut became one of the most highly recommended books of 2004 on both sides of the Atlantic, and the film rights were sold almost immediately upon publication. Though written as a young adult novel, many reviewers asserted that it possessed great "crossover" appeal for adult readers, too. Mark Haddon, one of the judges of the Guardian newspaper's annual book awards and himself the author of a crossover novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, hailed it as "that rare, rare thing, a first novel with a sustained, magical and utterly faultless voice," according to the London Evening Standard.

Rosoff had also written a children's picture book before setting out to write her first novel. Inspired in part by her young daughter, Rosoff penned a tale about a quartet of misbehaving boars, or wild pigs—Boris, Morris, Horace, and Doris—and the little boy and girl who try to point them in a more sociable direction. When the contract to publish Meet Wild Boars was finalized after an auction among British and American publishers, Rosoff quit her advertising job. The title was published in early 2005 in the United States, with illustrations from Sophie Blackall, whom Rosoff knew from her advertising days.

Tragedy strikes again

Yet as How I Live Now was winning rave reviews and literary honors, Rosoff was in the hospital undergoing treatment for breast cancer. She had been so busy in the pre-publication whirl that she missed her annual mammogram, the screening test for this form of cancer. "Then they found it," she told the Sunday Times. "Two of my sisters have had a particularly aggressive form of the cancer. You don't get a prognosis about whether you're going to live. I'm halfway through my chemotherapy and with each dose it gets worse. It doesn't hurt but you feel nauseated the week after so that even cranberry juice makes you feel sick because it's the same colour as the medication." Still, Rosoff's realistic outlook and somewhat cynical nature helped her put her situation into perspective. "I'm not a worrier. When people rang up and said, 'What a tragedy, your family is so unlucky,' I said that I expected it," she said. "You don't get through life without something terrifying happening."

Rosoff plans to continue her second, far more satisfying career as an author. In the article she wrote for the Guardian about her years in advertising, she wrote that "the first question everyone asks is: Don't you wish you'd done it sooner? And the obvious answer is: no. If I'd written my first novel 20 years ago, I'd still be trying to get it published today. It would have emerged tortured, humourless, and overlong; a thinly disguised autobiography attracting enough rejection to cause permanent psychological damage....Above all, I wouldn't have had the pleasure of not working in advertising—possibly the best thing about writing books. "

For More Information

Books

Rosoff, Meg. How I Live Now. New York: Wendy Lamb Books/Random House, 2004.

Periodicals

Bedell, Geraldine. "Review: Books: Fiction: Suddenly Last Summer." Observer (London, England) (July 25, 2004): p. 16.

Cooper, Ilene. "Meg Rosoff." Booklist (March 15, 2005): p. 1289.

Craig, Amanda. "Suffering? It's How I Live Now." Sunday Times (London, England) (November 14, 2004): p. 5.

Davey, Douglas P. Review of How I Live Now. School Library Journal (September 2004): p. 216.

Eccleshare, Julia. "Saturday Review: Childrens Fiction." Guardian (London, England) (October 9, 2004): p. 33.

"Living It Up." Bookseller (November 19, 2004): p. 15.

Mattson, Jennifer. "Review of How I Live Now." Booklist (September 1, 2004): p. 123.

McCaffrey, Meg. "Answering the Call." School Library Journal (March 2005): p. 46.

Page, Benedicte. "Living Through Wartime." Bookseller (June 4, 2004): p. 28.

Review of How I Live Now. Publishers Weekly (July 5, 2004): p. 56.

Review of Meet Wild Boars. Publishers Weekly (March 28, 2005): p. 78.

Rosoff, Meg. "Saturday Review: Commentary: How I Jumped out of the Sack Race." Guardian (London, England) (November 20, 2004): p. 7.

Sexton, David. "Dabbling in Disaster." Evening Standard (London, England) (August 2, 2004): p. 65.

Web Sites

Bookbrowse: Author Biography.http://www.bookbrowse.com/biographies/index.cfm?author_number=1059 (accessed on August 23, 2005).

Rosoff, Meg 1956-

PERSONAL:

Born 1956, in Boston, MA; daughter of Chester (a surgeon) and Lois (a psychiatric social worker) Rosoff; married Paul Hamlyn (a painter); children: Gloria. Education: Attended Harvard University; attended St. Martin's College of Art (London, England); completed B.A. degree in the United States.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Highbury, North London, England.

CAREER:

Writer. Worked previously in publishing and advertising.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, 2004, Whitbread Award shortlist, 2004, Branford Boase Award, 2005, Julia Ward Howe Award for Young Readers, 2005, and Michael L. Printz Award, 2005, all for How I Live Now.

WRITINGS:

(With Caren Acker) London Guide, Open Road (New York, NY), 1995, 2nd edition, 1998.

How I Live Now (young adult novel), Wendy Lamb Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Meet Wild Boars (picture book), illustrated by Sophie Blackall, Henry Holt (New York, NY), 2005.

Just in Case (young adult novel), Wendy Lamb Books (New York, NY), 2006.

Also author of screenplay adaptation of How I Live Now. Contributor to The Brighton Book, Myriad Editions (Brighton, England), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

When Meg Rosoff's youngest sister died of breast cancer, Rosoff decided that life was too short not to make an attempt to follow her own dream of being a writer. She left her job in advertising and began writing a novel, and the result was How I Live Now. Ironically, the book was published just after Rosoff herself was diagnosed with breast cancer. "I was in the hospital for my first operation when the book was released and all these flowers started arriving," Rosoff recalled to Publishers Weekly. "Half of the cards said ‘Congratulations,’ the other half said, ‘We're so sorry.’" In spite of the diagnosis, Rosoff has remained upbeat, and How I Live Now has received critical acclaim, having been shortlisted for the Whitbread Award and received the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.

How I Live Now tells the story of sassy New York native Daisy, who is spending her summer in England with relatives. She is relieved to get away from her father and "wicked" stepmother, and when she arrives in England she falls in love both with the farm where she is staying and with her first cousin, Edward. When her aunt goes out of town for a conference, it seems that the world belongs to Daisy and her cousins, but war erupts and shatters their adult-free world. Soldiers seize the farm and separate the cousins, placing Daisy with her much younger female cousin while the boys are taken somewhere else. Unwilling to be separated for long, Daisy and her cousin trek across the country to reconnect, only to face the violent results of the war before finally being reunited with each other.

A reviewer for Christian Century hailed the book as "an astonishing work of speculative fiction," while Deirdre F. Baker, writing in Horn Book, considered the story "a winning combination of acerbic commentary, innocence, and sober vision." Though some critics, including Jennifer Mattison of Booklist, noted the discomfort in the incestuous romance between Daisy and Edmond, Mattison concluded: "More central to the potency of Rosoff's debut … is the ominous prognostication of what a third world war might look like."

"A strength in the novel is the voice of Daisy—funny, spiky, and vulnerable," commented Benedicte Page, writing for Bookseller, "and it is difficult not to see a likeness to the author herself, a self-confessed ‘big-mouth’ … who says there is one line Daisy speaks in the novel which she herself thoroughly relates to: ‘I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.’" Other reviewers also fell in love with Daisy's narration; Claire Rosser called the character "an unforgettable heroine—vulnerable and flawed, yes, but fiercely loving and tough as well." A critic for Kirkus Reviews wrote that the story is "told in honest, raw first-person and filled with humor, love, pathos, and carnage." A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded: "Like the heroine, readers will emerge from the rubble much shaken, a little wiser, and with perhaps a greater sense of humanity."

Rosoff next published a critically acclaimed picture book titled Meet Wild Boars. Deemed a "silly cautionary tale" by School Library Journal contributor Mary Elam, the work concerns four outrageously impudent boars who revel in creating mayhem, such as devouring stuffed toys or bathing in the toilet. "There's not a bad habit, predilection, or odor that isn't described or drawn," noted Ilene Cooper in Booklist. According to a critic in Publishers Weekly, young readers will "relish rut-rutting such an uncouth crew, while secretly delighting in the boars' unmitigated chutzpah."

In Rosoff's second young adult novel, Just in Case, the author "examines the idea of fate through minutely observed, concatenated catastrophes and the intersection of exquisitely drawn characters," observed a contributor in Kirkus Reviews. After rescuing his little brother from falling out of an open window, fifteen-year-old David Case concludes that tragedy lurks around every corner, and he attempts to cheat Fate by adopting a new identity, that of Justin Case. While shopping for a new wardrobe at a thrift store, David meets Agnes, an edgy fashion photographer with whom he falls in love, though she uses the teen to propel her own career forward, going so far as to photograph him in the aftermath of a horrific plane crash. Just in Case garnered strong reviews. Writing in Booklist, Gillian Engberg praised Rosoff's "often poetic plunge into subjects of cosmic proportion, such as faith, time, free will, illusions, and the boundaries of love and sex," and School Library Journal critic Francisca Goldsmith observed that the author "writes of these characters and Justin's interior and exterior adventures with beautiful grace and wit."

"I like writing for and about teens because it's a very extreme time of life, and that makes for intense transformations, intense possibilities for growth," Rosoff reported in an interview for Bookbrowse.com. "I think many people find their teens a difficult and disturbing time, but also a time of great excitement and intensity. As a writer, you can't ask for a better set-up than that."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 1, 2004, Jennifer Mattson, review of How I Live Now, p. 123; March 15, 2005, Ilene Cooper, review of Meet Wild Boars, p. 1287, and Ilene Cooper, "Meg Rosoff: The Booklist Interview," p. 1289; June 1, 2006, Gillian Engberg, review of Just in Case, p. 64.

Bookseller, June 4, 2004, Benedicte Page, "Living through Wartime," p. 28; August 25, 2006, Lauren Ace, review of Just in Case, p. 11.

Children's Bookwatch, June, 2005, review of Meet Wild Boars; October, 2006, review of Just in Case.

Christian Century, December 14, 2004, review of How I Live Now, p. 24.

Daily Mail (London, England), July 1, 2005, Angela Levin, interview with Meg Rosoff, p. 18.

English Journal, September, 2005, review of How I Live Now, p. 106.

Evening Standard (London, England), August 2, 2004, David Sexton, review of How I Live Now, p. 65.

Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), July 30, 2005, Susan Perren, review of How I Live Now, p. D13.

Guardian (London, England), October 9, 2004, Julia Eccleshare, "Love, Loss, and Loyalty"; November 20, 2004, Meg Rosoff, "How I Jumped Out of the Sack Race," p. 7; July 23, 2005, Catherine Taylor, review of How I Live Now, p. 26; July 30, 2006, Kate Kellaway, "Don't Call Me Lucky," interview with Meg Rosoff.

Horn Book, September-October, 2004, Deirdre F. Baker, review of How I Live Now, p. 597; September-October, 2006, Christine M. Heppermann, review of Just in Case, p. 597.

Independent (London, England), July 8, 2005, Emma Hagestadt, review of How I Live Now, p. 27.

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, March, 2005, Laura McAndrews, review of How I Live Now, p. 528.

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2004, review of How I Live Now, p. 693; April 15, 2005, review of Meet Wild Boars, p. 481; July 15, 2006, review of Just in Case, p. 729; December 1, 2006, "Best Children's Books of 2006," review of Just in Case, p. S1.

Kliatt, July, 2004, Claire Rosser, review of How I Live Now, p. 12; March, 2005, Meg Rosoff, "My Unbrilliant Career (or How I Wrote My First Novel in Just 26 Years)," pp. 3-4; July, 2006, Claire Rosser, review of Just in Case, p. 14.

Magpies, March, 2005, Jo Goodman, review of How I Live Now, p. 43; August 14, 2006, Liza Nelson, review of Just in Case, p. 51.

New York Times Book Review, March 15, 2005, review of How I Live Now, p. 21.

Observer (London, England), July 25, 2004, Geraldine Bedell, review of How I Live Now, p. 16.

Publishers Weekly, June 30, 2003, p. 12; July 5, 2004, review of How I Live Now, p. 56; December 20, 2004, Sue Corbett, "Flying Starts: Five Acclaimed Fall Children's Book Debuts," p. 30; March 28, 2005, review of Meet Wild Boars, p. 78; July 24, 2006, review of Just in Case, p. 59.

School Library Journal, September, 2004, Douglas P. Davey, review of How I Live Now, p. 216; March, 2005, Meg McCaffrey, "Answering the Call," pp. 46-48; July, 2005, Mary Elam, review of Meet Wild Boars, p. 82; September, 2006, Francisca Goldsmith, review of Just in Case, p. 217.

Sun (London, England), July 15, 2005, Sam Wostear, review of How I Live Now, p. 59.

Sunday Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), January 23, 2005, interview with Meg Rosoff, p. 11.

Sunday Times (London, England), November 14, 2004, Amanda Craig, interview with Meg Rosoff, p. 5.

Times (London, England), July 30, 2005, Alyson Rudd, review of How I Live Now, p. 11.

Virginian Pilot, December 24, 2004, Tonet Mariano, review of How I Live Now, p. E4.

Voice of Youth Advocates, April, 2005, review of How I Live Now, p. 13.

ONLINE

Bookbrowse.com,http://wwwbookbrowse.com/ (April 27, 2005), (January 1, 2007), "Author Biography: Meg Rosoff."

British Book Trust,http://www.booktrusted.co.uk/ (February 1, 2006), Madelyne Travis, "Living in Dangerous Times," interview with Meg Rosoff.

Penguin UK Web site,http://www.penguin.co.uk/ (August 27, 2005), "Author of the Month," interview with Meg Rosoff.

Random House Web site,http://www.randomhouse.com/ (February 1, 2006), "Author Spotlight: Meg Rosoff."

ROSOFF, Meg 1956-

Personal

Born 1956, in Boston, MA; married Paul Hamlyn (a painter); children: one daughter. Education: Attended Harvard University; attended St. Martin's College of Art (London, England); completed B.A. degree in the United States.

Addresses

Home— Highbury, North London, England. Agent— c/o Wendy Lamb, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

Career

Writer. Worked previously in publishing and advertising.

Awards, Honors

Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, and Whitbread Award shortlist, both 2004, and Michael L. Printz Award, 2005, all for How I Live Now.

Writings

(With Caren Acker) London Guide, Open Road (New York, NY), 1995, second edition, 1998.

How I Live Now, Wendy Lamb (New York, NY), 2004.

Meet Wild Boars, illustrated by Sophie Blackall, Henry Holt (New York, NY), 2005.

Also author of screenplay adaptation of How I Live Now.

Work in Progress

A second novel.

Sidelights

When Meg Rosoff's youngest sister died of breast cancer, Rosoff decided that life was too short not to make an attempt to follow her own dream of being a writer. She left her job in advertising and began writing a novel, and the result was How I Live Now. Ironically, the book was published just after Rosoff herself was diagnosed with breast cancer. "I was in the hospital for my first operation when the book was released and all these flowers started arriving," Rosoff recalled to Publishers Weekly. "Half of the cards said 'Congratulations,' the other half said, 'We're so sorry.'" In spite of the diagnosis, Rosoff has remained upbeat, and How I Live Now has received critical acclaim, having been shortlisted for the Whitbread and received the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.

How I Live Now tells the story of sassy New York native Daisy, who is spending her summer in England with relatives. She is relieved to get away from her father and "wicked" stepmother, and when she arrives in England she falls in love both with the farm where she is staying and with her first cousin, Edward. When her aunt goes out of town for a conference, it seems that the world belongs to Daisy and her cousins, but war erupts and shatters their adult-free world. Soldiers seize the farm and separate the cousins, placing Daisy with her much younger female cousin while the boys are taken somewhere else. Unwilling to be separated for long, Daisy and her cousin trek across the country to reconnect, only to face the violent results of the war before finally being reunited with each other.

A reviewer for Christian Century hailed the book as "an astonishing work of speculative fiction," while Deirdre F. Baker, writing for Horn Book, considered the story "a winning combination of acerbic commentary, innocence, and sober vision." Though some critics, including Jennifer Mattison of Booklist, noted the discomfort in the incestuous romance between Daisy and Edmond, Mattison concluded, "More central to the potency of Rosoff's debut … is the ominous prognostication of what a third world war might look like."

"A strength in the novel is the voice of Daisy—funny, spiky, and vulnerable," commented Benedicte Page, writing for Bookseller, "and it is difficult not to see a likeness to the author herself, a self-confessed 'big-mouth' … who says there is one line Daisy speaks in the novel which she herself thoroughly relates to: 'I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.'" Other reviewers also fell in love with Daisy's narration; Claire Rosser called the character "an unforgettable heroine—vulnerable and flawed, yes, but fiercely loving and tough as well." A critic for Kirkus Reviews wrote that the story is "told in honest, raw first-person and filled with humor, love, pathos, and carnage." A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded, "Like the heroine, readers will emerge from the rubble much shaken, a little wiser, and with perhaps a greater sense of humanity."

Although Rosoff grew up in the United States, she, like Daisy, fell in love with England the first time she traveled there. "It is my spiritual home: people read books on the Tube," she explained to Page in the Bookseller interview. Soon at work on a second novel and planning to continue writing for teens, Rosoff reported in an interview for Bookbrowse.com: "I like writing for and about teens because it's a very extreme time of life, and that makes for intense transformations, intense possibilities for growth. I think many people find their teens a difficult and disturbing time, but also a time of great excitement and intensity. As a writer, you can't ask for a better set-up than that."

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 1, 2004, Jennifer Mattson, review of How I Live Now, p. 123.

Bookseller, June 4, 2004, Benedicte Page, "Living through Wartime," p. 28.

Christian Century, December 14, 2004, review of How I Live Now, p. 24.

Horn Book, September-October, 2004, Deirdre F. Baker, review of How I Live Now, p. 597.

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2004, review of How I Live Now, p. 693.

Kliatt, July, 2004, Claire Rosser, review of How I Live Now, p. 12.

New York Times Book Review, March 15, 2005.

Publishers Weekly, June 30, 2003, p. 12; July 5, 2004, review of How I Live Now, p. 56; December 20, 2004, "Flying Starts: Five Acclaimed Fall Children's Book Debuts," p. 30.

School Library Journal, September, 2004, Douglas P. Davey, review of How I Live Now, p. 216.

ONLINE

Bookbrowse.com, http://wwwbookbrowse.com/ (April 27, 2005), interview with Rosoff.

Penguin Web site, http://www.penguin.co.uk/ (August 27, 2005), interview with Rosoff.

Rosoff, Meg 1956-

PERSONAL: Born 1956, in Boston, MA; married Paul Hamlyn (a painter); children: one daughter. Education: Attended Harvard; attended St. Martin's College of Art (London, England); completed B.A. degree in the United States.

ADDRESSES: Home—Highbury, North London, England. Agent—c/o Wendy Lamb, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

CAREER: Writer. Worked previously in publishing and advertising.

AWARDS, HONORS: Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, and Whitbread Award shortlist, both 2004, and Michael L. Printz Award, 2005, all for How I Live Now.

WRITINGS:

(With Caren Acker) London Guide, Open Road (New York, NY), 1995, second edition, 1998.

How I Live Now, Wendy Lamb (New York, NY), 2004.

Meet Wild Boars, illustrated by Sophie Blackall, Henry Holt (New York, NY), 2005.

Also author of screenplay adaptation of How I Live Now.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A second novel.

SIDELIGHTS: When Meg Rosoff's youngest sister died of breast cancer, Rosoff decided that life was too short not to make an attempt to follow her own dream of being a writer. She left her job in advertising and began writing a novel, and the result was How I Live Now. Ironically, the book was published just after Rosoff herself was diagnosed with breast cancer. "I was in the hospital for my first operation when the book was released and all these flowers started arriving," Rosoff recalled to Publishers Weekly. "Half of the cards said 'Congratulations,' the other half said, 'We're so sorry.'" In spite of the diagnosis, Rosoff has remained upbeat, and How I Live Now has received critical acclaim, having been shortlisted for the Whitbread and received the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.

How I Live Now tells the story of sassy New York native Daisy, who is spending her summer in England with relatives. She is relieved to get away from her father and "wicked" stepmother, and when she arrives in England she falls in love both with the farm where she is staying and with her first cousin, Edward. When her aunt goes out of town for a conference, it seems that the world belongs to Daisy and her cousins, but war erupts and shatters their adult-free world. Soldiers seize the farm and separate the cousins, placing Daisy with her much younger female cousin while the boys are taken somewhere else. Unwilling to be separated for long, Daisy and her cousin trek across the country to reconnect, only to face the violent results of the war before finally being reunited with each other. A reviewer for Christian Century hailed the book as "an astonishing work of speculative fiction," while Deirdre F. Baker, writing for Horn Book, considered the story "a winning combination of acerbic commentary, innocence, and sober vision." Though some critics, including Jennifer Mattison of Booklist, noted the discomfort in the incestuous romance between Daisy and Edmond, Mattison concluded, "More central to the potency of Rosoff's debut … is the ominous prognostication of what a third world war might look like."

"A strength in the novel is the voice of Daisy—funny, spiky, and vulnerable," commented Benedicte Page, writing for Bookseller, "and it is difficult not to see a likeness to the author herself, a self-confessed 'bigmouth' … who says there is one line Daisy speaks in the novel which she herself thoroughly relates to: 'I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.'" Other reviewers also fell in love with Daisy's narration; Claire Rosser called the character "an unforgettable heroine—vulnerable and flawed, yes, but fiercely loving and tough as well." A critic for Kirkus Reviews wrote that the story is "told in honest, raw first-person and filled with humor, love, pathos, and carnage." A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded, "Like the heroine, readers will emerge from the rubble much shaken, a little wiser, and with perhaps a greater sense of humanity."

Although Rosoff grew up in the United States, she, like Daisy, fell in love with England the first time she traveled there. "It is my spiritual home: people read books on the Tube," she explained to Page in the Bookseller interview. Soon at work on a second novel and planning to continue writing for teens, Rosoff reported in an interview for Bookbrowse.com: "I like writing for and about teens because it's a very extreme time of life, and that makes for intense transformations, intense possibilities for growth. I think many people find their teens a difficult and disturbing time, but also a time of great excitement and intensity. As a writer, you can't ask for a better set-up than that."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 1, 2004, Jennifer Mattson, review of How I Live Now, p. 123.

Bookseller, June 4, 2004, Benedicte Page, "Living through Wartime," p. 28.

Christian Century, December 14, 2004, review of How I Live Now, p. 24.

Horn Book, September-October, 2004, Deirdre F. Baker, review of How I Live Now, p. 597.

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2004, review of How I Live Now, p. 693.

Kliatt, July, 2004, Claire Rosser, review of How I Live Now, p. 12.

New York Times Book Review, March 15, 2005.

Publishers Weekly, June 30, 2003, p. 12; July 5, 2004, review of How I Live Now, p. 56; December 20, 2004, "Flying Starts: Five Acclaimed Fall Children's Book Debuts," p. 30.

School Library Journal, September, 2004, Douglas P. Davey, review of How I Live Now, p. 216.

ONLINE

Bookbrowse.com, http://wwwbookbrowse.com/ (April 27, 2005), interview with Rosoff.

Penguin Web site, http://www.penguin.co.uk/ (August 27, 2005), interview with Rosoff.