What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
A book to colour your imagination,
Sent by a writer,
Alice Kuipers

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Books sometimes come to you at serendipitous times. For me, the reading of How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff, coincided with a time in my life when I was spending several weeks in rural England. The novel is wonderful.  It starts with fifteen year old Daisy arriving in the UK to stay with her cousins on a farm. Their mother leaves, and then a war begins. Rosoff never tells the causes of the war. Daisy is not interested. She’s too busy falling in love with her cousin, the compelling and startling Edmond. Soon the events of the war separate them and Daisy is transformed. 

In the UK this Easter a strange thing happened. The skies closed because of the giant ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano. Planes were prevented from flying. I was in Devon in a cottage on Dartmoor. After a couple of days with no flights, I began to notice how eerily quiet the skies were. I lolled in the flower-filled garden, the moors spread before me, the book dangling from my hand as I stared into the empty blue above. The extraordinary story of Daisy and her cousins roaming around a rural landscape blighted by rationing and violence had seeped from the pages, staining my imagination. The creepy silence of the skies echoed the cessation of flights in the novel. I couldn’t laze around the garden without feeling the cousins hurtling around behind me on their way to their barn. I couldn’t get up and walk over the moors without seeing Daisy frantically searching for Edmond. 

Meg Rosoff published How I Live Now in 2003 and gave up her career in advertising shortly after that. It was her first book but since then she has published many more (a thrilling discovery for me as I now have all the rest to read). She regularly updates her blog online at www.megrosoff.co.uk.  She wrote of her most recent novel:

For the best part of two years, the book has been constantly in my space, whining, stonewalling, refusing to play ball. I’ve been hating it, loving it, neglecting it; threatening, cajoling, pleading, throwing it out with the bath water, retrieving it; practicing tough love, bribery and suggesting it go play in traffic. Once I even told it I wasn’t its real mother.

She seems to feel that her book is somehow alive. I wonder if she felt the same way when writing How I Live Now.  I’m going to hazard a guess that she did. Writers feel that way about their characters and their stories. And when a writer is as talented as Rosoff, the reader feels life pulsing from the pages of her books. 

Rosoff’s writing is brave and moving. She writes of a teenager who is sent to England because she is destroying herself—both emotionally and, we discover, physically. It’s almost too late for Daisy, yet during her time in this country at war, she discovers that she is so much more than she gave herself credit for. It’s a classic story of trial and redemption, and it’s a love story. It’s a story of survival and of longing. This novel is alive. It leaves the page and tints your imagination like water coloured with a drop of blue dye.   

This year as the sky lay empty of planes, as the moors before me filled with Daisy and her story, life spilled from Rosoff’s pages and I felt more alive.

I hope that this novel comes at a serendipitous time for you too (although maybe without the drama of an entire country shutting down its airspace!). May it stain your imagination blue.

Yours respectfully,

Alice Kuipers 

encl: one inscribed paperback

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