How I Live Now - Meg Rosoff

“Every war has turning points and every person too.”

Fifteen-year-old Daisy is sent from Manhattan to England to visit her aunt and cousins she’s never met: three boys near her age, and their little sister. Her aunt goes away on business soon after Daisy arrives. The next day bombs go off as London is attacked and occupied by an unnamed enemy.

As power fails, and systems fail, the farm becomes more isolated. Despite the war, it’s a kind of Eden, with no adults in charge and no rules, a place where Daisy’s uncanny bond with her cousins grows into something rare and extraordinary. But the war is everywhere, and Daisy and her cousins must lead each other into a world that is unknown in the scariest, most elemental way"

I really appreciated this book. It is brutally honest, not overly dramatizing war nor seeing it through rose tinted glasses. I read this book in a day which is why I am posting 2 reviews today.

This novel is about SURVIVAL. It's a novel about how people change when faced with hardship and how people can come together in the oddest of ways. It's about family. It's about love. It's about hate. Meg Rosoff has a unique gift of just giving the reader the bare bones of a story, that is to say, no surnames are given, little background about the characters is revealed in depth, the enemy is referred to solely as just that, "The Enemy". While still making a profound impact. This is a novel about people and their determination to survive even in the face of hopelessness.

Daisy, who charmingly narrates her experiences during a world war, is no Teen Action Hero. She reacts as the vast majority of us would in dire circumstances: not by staging a coup or leading the resistance, but by surviving as best as she can.

Stylistically, this book is stunning. The prose is insightful and puzzling, but necessary given the circumstances of the novel. Finally, a book which reads as if the narrator is actually recalling events, rather than the artificially produced recollection of events and conversations, verbatim, which we have grown so used to.

I sincerely hope that people reading this book will start focusing on the beauty of the story, the prose, the characters, the structure which is at once remarkably simplistic and stunningly complex, and stop focusing on details which are not entirely pertinent to the story at large.(a rather unconventional cousin/cousin romance)

Age rating I would say 13/14. It is set in a war after all and there is one particularly disgusting scene when they come across the carnage of a massacre.