Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now sounds not a whole lot like her. When she’s onstage, she has a presence and voice that fills up the room and all the little spaces in your skull. But the protagonist of How I Live Now is a fifteen-year-old bad-attitude madly-in-love girl who fills up only her own space. Much of the work –

Massive spoilers

Is filled with the feeling of dirt and death and decay, even before the invasion. There is a sense of a dissolution of a life as she falls in love and the sense of a family unit breaking down when the siblings begin to fracture over whether they should go with the army, bunker down, or strike out on their own.

When I think of this book I think of scenes from war films, largely WWI, of brown and green and hot, bloody red, and blackened corpses. Then, all the way at the end of the novel, there is a single sentence where the color changes to white. White, cold light. It is a scene where the girl reunites with her lover and they come together, not clinging to the past they have lost, but coming together in the now.

From a reader perspective, that sentence is an immense payoff – especially if you read the book in one sitting. If you haven’t already, I’d put it on your to read list, somewhere near the top. It’s good.

I’m a fan of titles that add to the work and aren’t necessarily spoken within the work. Something that adds a whole new dimension, over and over again every time you read it with new eyes.