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"How I Live Now," Vocabulary from Part 2: Chapters 1-6

As you read Meg Rosoff's "How I Live Now," learn these word lists for the novel: Part 1: Chapters 1-10, Chapters 11-20, Chapters 21-29.
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Full list of words from this list:

  1. confound
    be confusing or perplexing to
    My willingness to eat confused and annoyed the staff, confounding their efforts to understand what I was doing there.
    Compare this verb to the antonymous noun "clarity" in this list. Although Daisy might still be confounding the people around her, she is moving towards clarity.
  2. diagnose
    determine the nature of a problem or an illness
    Eventually they were forced to release me, still unable to diagnose the obvious.
  3. maim
    injure or wound seriously and leave permanent disfiguration
    I was not interested in starving, killing, slashing, depriving, maiming or punishing myself.
  4. muffle
    conceal or hide
    Later I wrote more, my grief muffled but not eased by the passage of time.
  5. relinquish
    part with a possession or right
    But I will not relinquish a single detail of the past.
    Compare to the example sentence for "resist" in this list; both contribute to the image of Daisy fighting for herself, which includes keeping all the details of the past that make her who she is.
  6. resist
    withstand the force of something
    By then I was back in New York City, not because I wanted to be, but because I was half dragged and half deported and the final half was blackmail, and after all the rest of the things I managed to resist, I didn’t have the strength left for that particular fight.
  7. solitude
    a state of social isolation
    The worst part about those years wasn’t the hospital, or the solitude, or the war, or even being away from Edmond.
  8. cavernous
    being or suggesting a large dark enclosed space
    It was silent in there, cavernous and empty.
    A cavern is "a large cave" or "any large dark enclosed space"--it often represents confusion or ignorance, and a separation from the outside world; when a character emerges from a cavernous space, she is reborn with new realizations.
  9. sheaf
    a package of several things tied together
    Our right to be in England had to be double and triple confirmed, with sheaves of paperwork and fingerprinted identification cards in addition to the new kind of passports we’d been issued.
  10. gorse
    very spiny and dense evergreen shrub with fragrant golden-yellow flowers; common throughout western Europe
    The airport was unrecognizable from my last visit, completely overgrown with gorse and ivy and huge prehistoric-looking thistles.
    Although the actual reason for the state of the airport is due to the effects of war, all the vegetation symbolically seems to be saying that Daisy is not welcomed back in England, because gorse and thistles are prickly, and ivy are plants that grow like weeds on walls.
  11. dense
    hard to pass through because of heavy growth
    Their owners had hacked a space in the dense scrub that now covered everything, but the clearings looked temporary.
  12. ragged
    worn out from stress or strain
    I’m coming, I said silently to everything I’d left behind, and headed for the single, ragged bus that would take me home.
  13. nostalgic
    unhappy about being away and longing for familiar things
    The tabloids waxed nostalgic for the good old days of WWII, when the enemy all spoke a foreign language and the army went somewhere else to fight.
  14. gaunt
    very thin, especially from disease or hunger or cold
    Where Isaac was lean and graceful, he just looked gaunt.
  15. meticulous
    marked by extreme care in treatment of details
    I turned and looked at the garden, meticulously tended, by whom, I wondered.
  16. overpowering
    so strong as to be irresistible
    The child angel had been cleared of moss and planted all around with snowdrops and white narcissus that poured out an overpowering scent.
  17. desiccated
    thoroughly dried out
    I thought of the ghost of that long-dead child, watching us, its desiccated bones sunk deep into the ground below.
  18. obscene
    offensive to the mind
    They were almost finished now, spread open too far, splayed, exposing obscene black centers.
  19. unyielding
    resistant to physical force or pressure
    I turned back and met his eyes, hard and angry and unyielding.
  20. reconcile
    make compatible with
    I couldn’t reconcile it with this scene.
  21. ferocious
    marked by extreme and violent energy
    The air was suffocating, charged, the hungry plants sucking at the earth with their ferocious appetites.
  22. claustrophobic
    uncomfortably closed or hemmed in
    I felt claustrophobic, choked, desperately thinking bright thoughts so Edmond couldn’t get inside my head and know how terrified and furious and guilty I felt.
  23. preface
    a short introductory essay preceding the text of a book
    “Talk to him,” he said with no preface.
    This word is sometimes used for an introduction to something about to be said or done, as it is done here.
  24. sustain
    be the physical support of
    In the end, the warmth and the scent and the heavy slow buzz of bees seduced me, worked on my brain like opium, so the tightly clenched core of fear and fury that had sustained me all these years began to unfurl.
  25. adversity
    a state of misfortune or affliction
    And so I tried to explain about our journey and the day Piper and I were at the house looking for him as usual and the phone ringing and my father’s voice at the other end and how for all those years I wished I hadn’t picked up the phone that day but I did and by the time I realized what his plan was for me there was nothing I could do because he knew where I was and he had International Connections and despite all my journeys and triumphs over adversity I was still just a fifteen-year-old kid.
  26. constellation
    a configuration of stars as seen from the earth
    We sat there as day turned to twilight and twilight to evening and the moon rose and the constellations moved across the sky and I talked and he listened and it took almost all night to tell him everything but I didn’t stop until there was nothing left to tell.
  27. proportion
    relation with respect to comparative quantity or magnitude
    According to Piper, after The Occupation finished most of the young men were drafted into the army and a good proportion of the urban population began to redistribute itself toward the countryside where it was supposed to be safer.
  28. privileged
    not subject to usual rules or penalties
    As outsiders, we both saw our role somewhere in the quadrant of Privileged Caretakers.
  29. immense
    unusually great in size or amount or extent or scope
    But he knew it would take an immense leap of faith for anyone to act.
  30. prune
    weed out unwanted or unnecessary things
    "He weeded and pruned and dug up old bulbs and put them away for the winter, and collected seed and labeled it, and when spring came he started to plant things and not just for food, for—for something else.”
  31. stagger
    walk as if unable to control one's movements
    We watched a honeybee lurch from one fat flower to the next, drunk and staggering under the weight of all that botanical destiny.
    "Stagger" and "lurch" are synonymous verbs here, but in this example sentence, the honeybee is not walking but flying awkwardly like it's drunk from all the nectar and weighted by its responsibility for pollinating the flowers.
  32. clarity
    the quality of being coherent and easily understood
    And suddenly I knew something with terrifying clarity.
  33. massacre
    the savage and excessive killing of many people
    I knew Edmond had witnessed the massacre.
    Compare to the synonymous "carnage" in the list for Chapters 1-10. The example sentence for "carnage" was long and rambling, and contained the word "fun" because Daisy and her cousins were not yet truly affected by the war. In contrast, this brief sentence emphasizes the powerful effect of the massacre on Edmond.
  34. bearable
    capable of being endured
    He could help them, which makes pain bearable.
  35. insatiable
    impossible to fulfill, appease, or gratify
    Saved from the ravages of war by stubbornness and ignorance and an insatiable hunger for love.
Created on Wed Oct 23 16:37:36 EDT 2013 (updated Wed Nov 13 11:16:22 EST 2013)

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