From: McClelland, Kate <mcclelland>
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 16:50:12 -0500

Rosoff took some daring risks with how I live now. She tells a story in a unique voice which, though not always likable in its physically and emotionally starved self?sorption, thoroughly entertained and engaged me as a reader. I watched that voice change over the period of the novel, never losing its humorous edge but growing in more maturity and conventional expression. Rosoff risked not filling in all the gaps in our knowledge of Daisy or of the war, keeping us constantly intrigued as readers. The Edenic farm setting renders the escalating horrors of war in ever more stark relief. The relationship with Edmond was, for me, highly symbolic since "... the war provided a perfect limbo in which two people who were young and too related could start kissing without anything or anyone making us stop." The metaphor of gardening for this "ravenous" city girl is advanced from the farm, through the nightmarish survival segment to her reunion with Edmond in his strangely suffocating white garden. It is in this garden, a tangle of passion and rage, that the story comes full circle and Daisy herself (a white flower after all) becomes a gardener...a nurturer. Every time I read how I live now, its endless wit, its vibrant pacing, its layers of meaning and its incredible beauty reward me. Rosoff has written a gutsy book for a gutsy teen population who may someday have to live in the surreally cut-off world she so compellingly depicts and who will need to have her knowledge of the redemptive power of love. Kate McClelland 2005 Printz Committee member
Received on Fri 25 Feb 2005 03:50:12 PM CST