How I Live Now

Rating:
Summary: A good adult read too
Review: I enjoyed this book! I found the book very compelling and read it in two nights. Meg Rosoff writes with a unique voice.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Review: I picked this book up without knowing that is really for a "young adult" audience. But, since I already had it, I thought I would go ahead and read it, passing it along if I liked it. Well, it is a wonderful book. Sad and yet hopeful, interesting and so well written. This is a must read for a young person, a great book for a parent and child to read together.

Rating:
Summary: How I live Now
Review: Stuck on a farm in rural England, 15 year old Daisy finds herself questioning what exactly she would be doing all summer. Her cellphone doesn't work, and they have no telly, and the local hangout is " The Food Que." She no longer needs to starve herself, because her father and awfull step mom are not around to be disgusted by it. When her Aunt goes to visit her friend, she leaves all of the children behind. As days go by and Aunt Penn still doesn't return, the children begin wondering what on earth had hapend to her. To their suprise, they find themselves in the middle of the biggest war the world has ever seen, and clearly Aunt Penn won't be back for quiet a while. At first its all fun and games to them. No rules, No adults around to tell you what to do. What could be better? Daisy and her chain smoking cousin Edmond enter into the world of " incest and underage sex!" and love every minute of it.
Things don't continue at this upbeat pace, pretty soon the war catches up with them, food runs out, theyre home is occupied, and the children are seperated. Daisy is starving, and for the first time, she doesn't like it.
How I Live Now is a shocking, humourous yet heartbreaking account of Daisys life during this awfull time, and how it ironicly helps her win the war that was raging inside of herself. Not by any account is this your typical YA novel, it focus's on many controversial issues that most authors veer away from. I loved it.

Rating:
Summary: Unique literary voice
Review: The most impressive quality of "How I Live Now" is the author's unique literary voice - a first-person narrative at once smart, witty, sardonic and perceptively true to the teenage mind (I know, I live with one). The most chilling aspect of the plot is the realization that, given the current fragile world situation, it COULD happen, and in a way just as author Rosoff describes it. This is a book that both teens and adults should find enormously entertaining and thought-provoking as they come to care deeply about Daisy and about the world that challenges her very existence.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: The story is enthralling, and it's such a good idea to have it set in a war. Wars seem to be a subject that most people my age are quite interested in, particularly because there are so many wars going on at the moment, and they want to find out what it would really be like to live through one. But I think this war is even more interesting, it's not that I find previous or current wars boring, but that basically everything that could be found out and written about has been, and to invent a new war opens many more possibilities for events, without having to worry about being historically correct. Also it allows the war to be set in England, instead of a far off country that would probably be hard to imagine living in, even if it wasn't during a war.

I love the descriptions of the English country house, it seems a perfect setting, and creates such a contrast to the war. I also like how as Daisy and Piper spend longer away from the house, it becomes a more distant memory, for both them and the reader. There is so much detail about the war and other bad things, I forgot many of the details of the house, and how Daisy spent her first few happy days with her cousins.

By including Daisy's view of herself, and her eating problems, it will include lots of people who feel the same way about their appearance. It makes an interesting kind of side-story, and I liked seeing her growing out of it very slowly and subtly.

When Daisy saw Edmond again, after they were separated to go to different houses, and Edmond ignored her when he first saw her, I was shocked, and really quite sad. It ended the reader's and Daisy's dreams of the perfect life they would have had together both at once, which made me feel very sorry for Daisy. The ending was quite surprising, and at first I resented the fact that the author didn't let it immediately work out with Edmond and Daisy, but now I feel it made it more realistic and interesting. It is a sad, but hopeful ending. It was also good to see that Piper had got on with her life, and she'd found someone to appreciate her.

I like how there are no speech marks, and speech is just written in. It saves a lot of space, and it's an interesting and unusual way of doing it.

I'm not just saying good things about this book because I don't want to say anything negative, but at a first read, I really cannot find much I dislike about the book.

Rating:
Summary: How I Live Now review
Review: There were a lot of really great things about this book. The girl Daisy is very interesting and she has to face a lot of challenges when the war happens in England. She has cool relatives and they get to live independently during the war, and she has amazing adventures. She is pretty funny, too. But there were other things about the book that I thought were too thin soup. How did the war happen? What is up with the psychic powers that people have? What happened really to end the war? I thought that this was a book that could have been a lot longer and it would have been a lot better.

Rating:
Summary: Edgy and Unique
Review: This book is a breath of fresh air!!

The author's unique style of writing is so readable
and perfectly tailored to the story told by Daisy. How
I Live Now is not just a readable and engaging story
but storytelling at it's best. I laughed and laughed
and then I cried.

The setting and the issues are of the moment. Every
reader will enjoy the inventive plot but adults will
appreciate more the reality of its
sometimes subtle (and sometimes less than subtle)
themes.

I've read it twice already and am going back for
more. It is rare to find a book that needs to be
devoured and when you finally put it down you want
to go back again because you can't believe that it was
so good.

Fabulous!!

Rating:
Summary: A YA book I couldn't put it down
Review: Told from the unforgettable point of view of a 15-year-old girl called Daisy, Meg Rosoff's HOW I LIVE NOW is a compelling debut novel that has much more meat on its bones than its narrator (who suffers from anorexia). Daisy is sent to England, war breaks out, and she and her cousins -- some of whom can read her mind -- are left without adult supervision. Daisy and her cousin Edmond fall in love, then are separated for the duration of the occupation, and they maintain a kind of pychic connection until something terrible happens to break it.

This is the kind of book you can't put down, one you wish would never end. Some people may quibble over Daisy's rambling thoughts. The sentences are long and the author and editor obviously didn't think punctuation essential. But Daisy's voice comes to you right as if she is talking and thinking, true and real and heartbreaking.

I highly recommend this book to both teens and adults.

Rating:
Summary: Adolescent cousins as lovers
Review: While this book has many strong points, it introduces a sexual relationship between cousins, one 14-years-old and one 15. But it doesn't put this in any psychological context, leaving adolescent readers to sort it out on their own. To me, this is irresponsible of the author. I don't object at all to writing about sexually active teenagers. I do object to writing about incest without giving readers some guidance about it.