If you enjoyed this you will like 'What I Was' by the same author, I did. I know 'How I Live Now' has been read and enjoyed by teenagers with a mature outlook, whatever the age. ( )

"How I Live Now" is Meg Rosoff's first novel and won the Printz Award for young adult literature. That said, I would recommend it for the more mature YA due to certain ideas presented.

Daisy is a New York teen exiled to live with her aunt and cousins in the English countryside. Daisy's "evil" step-mother is about to have a baby of her own and is not interested in handling a smart-aleck teenager with an eating disorder. Daisy settles in easily with her British relatives and lives a rather idyllic country life ... until the unthinkable happens. While Daisy's aunt is out of the country at a conference on terrorism, England is invaded by an unknown enemy. Living in the countryside the children are far from the bombs and trouble and they continue to laze away their summer days, as children will. These happy and peaceful days are highlighted by Daisy's passionate and secret relationship with her cousin Edmond. Daisy knows that this relationship is wrong, but with no adult supervision Daisy and Edmond give in to their attraction to each other.

"The real truth is that the war didn’t have much to do with it except that it provided a perfect limbo in which two people who were too young and too related could start kissing without anything or anyone making us stop."

I am not sure why the author included a forbidden relationship in this story. The love story is integral to the novel, but I remain baffled by the author's choice of family relation.

The atmosphere of the novel takes a dark turn when their country home is sequestered by the British military, and the children are separated and sent to live with other families. The enemy is placated by the docility of the populace for a time, but tensions soon rise and nearly every encounter is highly charged and fatal to someone. Electricity becomes non-existent and food is scarce. As everyone around her begins looking gaunt, Daisy realizes the irony of her situation now that starvation is not self imposed. The children witness terrible atrocities and are left to struggle against the elements and hunger in their search to find a safe place and, hopefully, each other.

"How I Live Now" is a terrifying story made more so by an unknown enemy with an unknown purpose. It is a love story and a war story that tells how war changes people, sometimes devastatingly so, and how love can heal even the most destroyed souls. ( )

There is really only one way to win a prize like the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize: to be different – and How I Live Now is one of the most different books I have ever read. Set in modern times, it nevertheless has a quaint, early 20th century feel, and the narration is like no other narration on earth – devoid of quotation marks, with frequent Capitalised Phrases and even occasional tense switching. The result is quite remarkable – it really feels as though the reader is in a room with Daisy the teenage girl, chatting comfortably about the events of the summer. Funnily enough, even despite the unique style, this book is wonderfully easy to read, flowing better than most books written in regular style.

As a tale of children battling their way through a harsh war, How I Live Now ranks superbly. At the beginning, there is an air of ‘there might be a war on but we don’t care’, but then as the novel progresses, and the children are drawn deeper into the conflict, the tone becomes gradually more despairing and tortured. This book succeeds where Tomorrow When the War Began failed – it will tear readers’ hearts out with a tale of children struggling for survival that is subtly different from any other survival story. When it comes to survival stories, I am usually incredibly cold and unsympathetic; bored out of my skull with ‘oh, poor, poor me’ tales of children in war-torn poverty with nothing to eat, where the plot is a meaningless ramble of pitiful struggles and I can relate to the characters about as much as I can relate to a wooden spoon. It would have been so easy for Rosoff to fall into the trap of writing a book like this – but to her immense credit, she hasn’t, and for this reason alone, I would read How I Live Now five times over. It may not be a fast-paced action thriller, but it held my attention effortlessly.

Despite winning a children’s fiction prize, however, this wonderful book is definitely not for young children. I would certainly never give it to anyone under the age of thirteen – amongst other things, it deals with incest, smoking, and occasional scenes of high-level blood and gore.

A truly unforgettable achievement; How I Live Now is an exquisite personal journey that looks at the world through very different eyes. Recommended for book-lovers who think they’ve seen everything.

Whoa. This book is pretty intense. The writer/protagonist writes like my brain writes. It was weird to read that. ( )

Wonderful story!
I like it sooooooo much that sometimes re-reading it I cry... ( )