Part of that was because of the war, which supposedly changed lots of things, but I can’t remember much about life before the war anyway so it doesn’t count in my book, which this is.

Their initial experience of life in war time is mainly a joyous one where the absence of adults can allow a teenage incestuous relationship to bloom.īut the summer I went to England to stay with my cousins everything changed. It would be enough to enchant snarky, cynical Daisy without the added complication of her falling in love with the other twin boy Edmund.Īs their relationship develops, Aunt Penn (some sort of international peacekeeper) goes to Oslo to work on averting an imminent war – details are not greatly forthcoming in How I Live Now – and the children are left to fend for themselves in a kind of Swallows and Amazons idyll as war inevitably breaks out. Sixteen year old Osbert is the only one who goes to school, eight year old Piper is ethereal and wise beyond her years and one of the twin boys, Isaac talks to animals.

How I Live Now is the first-person story of Daisy, a smart yet self-absorbed 15-year-old who arrives from New York’s Upper West Side to stay with her Aunt and her four English cousins in their romantic and eccentric rambling English farmhouse, where the children live a partly feral, partly bohemian lifestyle, eschewing school for nature and rules for telepathy and smoking. I have absolutely no problem with YA, but I do feel that there comes a time in your reading life when the emotional connection you make with the material you are reading depends on where you are and what have experienced. I bought it years ago, but didn’t realise it was a YA novel until quite recently. Let’s start by saying that as a 40 something mother I am not the target market for How I Live Now. That’s where I find myself with How I Live Now – Meg Rosoff’s award winning, critically acclaimed, Hollywood courted YA novel which left me personally feeling, well, underwhelmed. Do you ever read a book, read the effusive praise from the critics and then totally doubt your reaction to it?

This is how i live now book