I just finished Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now.  It was excellent, and actually won a Printz Award for YA Lit (given by the ALA), which isn't surprising.  The core of the story is survival--how people survive horrible things, and how children can't remain children when war touches their lives.  And it's about love and it's about self-abegnation, and it's about the way we live now.  Even if you don't like YA lit, I highly recommend you check it out.

In the book, Daisy and Piper are forced to take to the country in during an Occupation.  They eat hazelnuts and mushrooms and forage and must navigate and press on with no hope of medical treatment, no sure place they're going to, and no break in the pain, mental and physical.

I've actually thought occassionally about what I would be forced to do if Those People somehow were occupying America.  I don't think I'm the sort of person who can make do.  I don't know how to forage, hunt, kill--any of it.  I don't know how to survive.  I've always felt fairly certain that I would be one of those panicked, hysterical people who couldn't make it, unless I found someone whose practical skills calmed me down and could do for the both of us.  I just can't see myself keeping cool enough to remember the basic trick of survival--which is seems some people can do.  It seems that the human mind and body does have instincts, and that some people can get back to them in times of great need.

I don't think I'm one of that lot, to be honest.  I'm smart, but I'm too high-strung.  Anyway, now I live in a city, and if it comes to that--bombs and biological warfare and occupation, and decimation, well, I live in one of those places that could very well be a prime target.  As hard as it would be to get out alive in the country, it'd be even harder doing it when you have to leave the city to get to that wilderness.  I suppose that I would make every attempt to get to my sister, and then my mom and dad, and then, well, I guess we'd go north or west, but I don't know that we'd get very far.  Who's going to do the killing for eating? 

Maybe I should break up with S and take up with a mountain man, so if the world as we know it ends, I could survive.  Or maybe I wouldn't be happy anyway, and should just pretend that those things aren't a danger, not really.  (Although there are rumors of the world ending on Aug. 22.  We'll see.)  As it is, How I Live Now is chilling, in that it forces you to contemplate such scenarios.