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Summary
Summary
"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. A riveting and astonishing story. From the Hardcover edition.
Author Notes
Meg Rosoff was born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 16, 1956. She studied at Harvard University, but left for England in 1977 to take classes at Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design. She returned to finish her degree in English and fine arts at Harvard University. She worked in New York City for 10 years in publishing and advertising, before moving to England.
Her first novel, How I Live Now, was published in 2004 and won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. Her other novels include What I Was, The Bride's Farewell, There Is No Dog, Moose Baby, and Picture Me Gone. Just in Case won the 2007 Carnegie Medal. She won the 2016 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. She is also the author of a picture book entitled Meet Wild Boars and co-author of a non-fiction book entitled London Guide: Your Passport to Great Travel.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Horn Book Review
In this 2005 Printz Award winner, fifteen-year-old Daisy speaks directly to the listener. Her city-smart voice both tells her story and provides an ironic commentary on the cataclysmic events that forever alter her life the summer she goes to England to visit her cousins: sixteen-year-old Osbert, fourteen-year-old Edmond and his twin brother Isaac, and nine-year-old Piper. Guest's voice is perfect for the Daisy we meet at the beginning, before the world slides inexorably into dystopia: a mixture of flippant nonchalance, barely concealed anger, carefully controlled pain, and gargantuan self-absorption. The voices of the secondary characters are all relayed through Daisy's consciousness, and Guest is careful to individualize them without allowing us to lose the sense that we are still hearing Daisy speak. As the horrors of war gradually alter the landscape, Guest's matter-of-fact delivery makes this tale both bearable and all too real. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 8 Up-Impending war, parental rejection, and anorexia are Daisy's concerns as she steps off the plane in England where she's been sent to stay with her Aunt Pen and her four cousins. The 15-year-old has landed in a chaotic but supportive country household where she is immediately intrigued by her cousin, Edmund. In this novel (Wendy Lamb Books, 2004), Meg Rosoff explores what happens when war leaves these five youngsters to fend for themselves. There are the hardships of finding food and the loss of their mother, but there is also freedom and unexpected tenderness that evolves into an intense physical relationship between Daisy and Edmund. When the two are parted, Daisy takes charge of her youngest cousin, Piper, and the two young women set off to find Edmund and his twin Isaac. What they discover is a brutal massacre but not their kin. Finally returning to the family home, the two girls spend every waking minute trying to survive until Daisy's dad forcibly extricates her from England. It's many years before all of them are reunited. Kim Mai Guest reads with a light, slightly saucy tone which is just right for a New Yorker like Daisy. Though the novel has disturbing elements, Rosoff handles the harshness of war and the taboo of incest with honest introspection. This Printz award winner is a good choice for book discussions as it considers the disruption of war both physically and emotionally and should be on every high school and public library shelf.-Barbara Wysocki, Cora J. Belden Library, Rocky Hill, CT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
This riveting first novel paints a frighteningly realistic picture of a world war breaking out in the 21st century. Told from the point of view of 15-year-old Manhattan native Daisy, the novel follows her arrival and her stay with cousins on a remote farm in England. Soon after Daisy settles into their farmhouse, her Aunt Penn becomes stranded in Oslo and terrorists invade and occupy England. Daisy's candid, intelligent narrative draws readers into her very private world, which appears almost utopian at first with no adult supervision (especially by contrast with her home life with her widowed father and his new wife). The heroine finds herself falling in love with cousin Edmond, and the author credibly creates a world in which social taboos are temporarily erased. When soldiers usurp the farm, they send the girls off separately from the boys, and Daisy becomes determined to keep herself and her youngest cousin, Piper, alive. Like the ripple effects of paranoia and panic in society, the changes within Daisy do not occur all at once, but they have dramatic effects. In the span of a few months, she goes from a self-centered, disgruntled teen to a courageous survivor motivated by love and compassion. How she comes to understand the effects the war has had on others provides the greatest evidence of her growth, as well as her motivation to get through to those who seem lost to war's consequences. Teens may feel that they have experienced a war themselves as they vicariously witness Daisy's worst nightmares. Like the heroine, readers will emerge from the rubble much shaken, a little wiser and with perhaps a greater sense of humanity. Ages 12-up. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Gr. 8-11. A 15-year-old, contemporary urbanite named Daisy, sent to England to summer with relatives, falls in love with her aunt's oldy worldy farm and her soulful cousins--especially Edmond, with whom she forms the world's most inappropriate case of sexual obsession. Matters veer in a startling direction when terrorists strike while Daisy's aunt is out of the country, war erupts, and soldiers divide the cousins by gender between two guardians. Determined to rejoin Edmond, Daisy and her youngest cousin embark upon a dangerous journey that brings them face to face with horrific violence and undreamt-of deprivation. Just prior to the hopeful conclusion, Rosoff introduces a jolting leap forward in time accompanied by an evocative graphic device that will undoubtedly spark lively discussions. As for the incestuous romance, Daisy and Edmond's separation for most of the novel and the obvious emotional sustenance Daisy draws from their bond sensitively shift the focus away from the relationship's implicit (and potentially discomfiting) physical dimension. More central to the potency of Rosoff's debut, though, is the ominous prognostication of what a third world war might look like, and the opportunity it provides for teens to imagine themselves, like Daisy, exhibiting courage and resilience in roles traditionally occupied by earlier generations. --Jennifer Mattson Copyright 2004 Booklist
Guardian Review
There are some pretty good children's novels out there, but it is only occasionally that one comes along with a voice so stridently pure and direct and funny that you simply can't question it - you tumble willingly into its thrall. If that novel manages to stay small yet still touch on life's baffling big issues - sex, death, war, terror, loss - and if it can speak to young people as loudly as to grown-ups, then we're talking about a piece of writing that should last for generations. Meg Rosoff's crunchily perfect knock-out of a debut novel is published by Puffin and aimed at kids, though exactly what age those kids should be is hard to say. This is a tale that ventures into taboo territory, but treads on tiptoe. There's definitely something traditional, even gothic, about it, but at the same time it's modern, funny and real. If E Nesbit were alive and well and had teamed up with Philip Roth to write for children, there's a chance they might have come up with How I Live Now Fifteen-year-old Daisy is an American packed off to deepest rural England to stay with her delectably eccentric aunt and cousins. Nothing very new here - it's the cosily familiar territory of a zillion Bedknobs and Narnia -style stories. But there the simi larities end: cousin Edmond, 14, has turned up to collect her from the airport driving the family jeep and with a fag in his mouth. Though Daisy is initially agog, she soon falls in with her new lifestyle - no rules, lots of warmth and spontaneity and a family who snuggle up together when things get tough. The snuggling gets important later. Not that there's any really funny business until war is triggered by a bomb going off in a London train station and killing, according to Daisy, 7,000 or maybe 70,000 people. Though her lazy vagueness about those numbers is acutely teenage, she now has to grow up fast. In the best traditions of children's classics, she and her cousins are left to fend for themselves; only we're not talking snow queens and smugglers, but what feels like a chillingly credible post- September 11 catastrophe. Nothing in the lighthearted, throwaway eccentricity of Rosoff's beginning could have prepared us for the hardship, fear and violence that follow. And sex, too. The consummation of the adolescent stirrings between Daisy and Edmond pulse through Rosoff's prose -thrillingly, candidly present, if opaquely so. What happened, Daisy later wisely surmises, is that the war provided "a perfect limbo in which two people who were too young and too related could start kissing without anyone or anything to make us stop". In a way - and again in the tradition of the most lasting and exhilarating children's literature - the whole novel is a kind of limbo. Terrible things unfold within its pages, as do forbidden things. But to dwell on these is to somehow miss the point. This is first and foremost a book about narrative: Daisy's telling - fresh, honest, rude, funny, hopeless, sexy and never once hitting a false note -absolutely carries the tale, which would be nothing without it. But ultimately it's a story about the only thing worth writing about: enduring love. I put it down with tears on my face and the absolute certainty that if, at 12, 13 or 14, a novel like this had provided my first glimpse of sex and death, I'd have grown up saner and wiser for it. Julie Myerson's most recent novel is Something Might Happen (Cape). To order How I Live Now for pounds 10.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-rosoff.1 What happened, [Daisy] later wisely surmises, is that the war provided "a perfect limbo in which two people who were too young and too related could start kissing without anyone or anything to make us stop". In a way - and again in the tradition of the most lasting and exhilarating children's literature - the whole novel is a kind of limbo. Terrible things unfold within its pages, as do forbidden things. But to dwell on these is to somehow miss the point. This is first and foremost a book about narrative: Daisy's telling - fresh, honest, rude, funny, hopeless, sexy and never once hitting a false note -absolutely carries the tale, which would be nothing without it. But ultimately it's a story about the only thing worth writing about: enduring love. I put it down with tears on my face and the absolute certainty that if, at 12, 13 or 14, a novel like this had provided my first glimpse of sex and death, I'd have grown up saner and wiser for it. - Julie Myerson.
Kirkus Review
Manhattanite Daisy, 15, moves to London to stay with an aunt and cousins she's never met. Without preamble or fanfare, an unidentified enemy attacks and war ensues. Her aunt is abroad on a peace mission, meaning that Daisy and her three cousins, with whom she forges a remarkable relationship, must survive almost entirely on their own. This is a very relatable contemporary story, told in honest, raw first-person and filled with humor, love, pathos, and carnage. War, as it will, changes these young people irrevocably, not necessarily for the worse. They and readers know that no one will ever be the same. The story of Daisy and her three exceptional cousins, one of whom becomes her first lover, offers a keen perspective on human courage and resilience. An epilogue, set six years after the conclusion, while war still lingers, ends Daisy's story on a bittersweet, hopeful note. (Fiction. 12+) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 My name is Elizabeth but no one's ever called me that. My father took one look at me when I was born and must have thought I had the face of someone dignified and sad like an old-fashioned queen or a dead person, but what I turned out like is plain, not much there to notice. Even my life so far has been plain. More Daisy than Elizabeth from the word go. But the summer I went to England to stay with my cousins everything changed. 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. Mostly everything changed because of Edmond. And so here's what happened. 2 I'm coming off this plane, and I'll tell you why that is later, and landing at London airport and I'm looking around for a middle-aged kind of woman who I've seen in pictures who's my Aunt Penn. The photographs are out of date, but she looked like the type who would wear a big necklace and flat shoes, and maybe some kind of narrow dress in black or gray. But I'm just guessing since the pictures only showed her face. Anyway, I'm looking and looking and everyone's leaving and there's no signal on my phone and I'm thinking Oh great, I'm going to be abandoned at the airport so that's two countries they don't want me in, when I notice everyone's gone except this kid who comes up to me and says You must be Daisy. And when I look relieved he does too and says I'm Edmond. Hello Edmond, I said, nice to meet you, and I look at him hard to try to get a feel for what my new life with my cousins might be like. Now let me tell you what he looks like before I forget because it's not exactly what you'd expect from your average fourteen-year-old what with the CIGARETTE and hair that looked like he cut it himself with a hatchet in the dead of night, but aside from that he's exactly like some kind of mutt, you know the ones you see at the dog shelter who are kind of hopeful and sweet and put their nose straight into your hand when they meet you with a certain kind of dignity and you know from that second that you're going to take him home? Well that's him. Only he took me home. I'll take your bag, he said, and even though he's about half a mile shorter than me and has arms about as thick as a dog leg, he grabs my bag, and I grab it back and say Where's your mom, is she in the car? And he smiles and takes a drag on his cigarette, which even though I know smoking kills and all that, I think is a little bit cool, but maybe all the kids in England smoke cigarettes? I don't say anything in case it's a well-known fact that the smoking age in England is something like twelve and by making a big thing about it I'll end up looking like an idiot when I've barely been here five minutes. Anyway, he says Mum couldn't come to the airport cause she's working and it's not worth anyone's life to interrupt her while she's working, and everyone else seemed to be somewhere else, so I drove here myself. I looked at him funny then. You drove here yourself? You DROVE HERE yourself? Yeah well and I'M the Duchess of Panama's Private Secretary. And then he gave a little shrug and a little dog-shelter-dog kind of tilt of his head and he pointed at a falling-apart black jeep and he opened the door by reaching in through the window which was open, and pulling the handle up and yanking. He threw my bag in the back, though more like pushed it in, because it was pretty heavy, and then said Get in Cousin Daisy, and there was nothing else I could think of to do so I got in. I'm still trying to get my head around all this when instead of following the signs that say Exit he turns the car up onto this grass and then drives across to a sign that says Do Not Enter and of course he Enters and then he jogs left across a ditch and suddenly we're out on the highway. Can you believe they charge £13.50 just to park there for an hour? he says to me. Well to be fair, there is no way I'm believing any of this, being driven along on the wrong side of the road by this skinny kid dragging on a cigarette and let's face it who wouldn't be thinking what a weird place England is. And then he looked at me again in his funny doggy way, and he said You'll get used to it. Which was strange too, because I hadn't said anything out loud. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
