How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff is the winner of the 2005 Michael L. Printz Award and the ALA Best Books for Young Adults. The story is set in a countryside village in England and centers around Daisy, a fifteen year old girl from New York, and her four English cousins. Daisies father has sent her to stay in England for the summer with her Aunt Penn and cousins who she has never met. Soon after her arrival Daisy’s aunt is called abroad for work, leaving the children on their own. The children quickly forge a relationship that is stronger than any of them expected. Things quickly change though when England is attacked by an unknown enemy and war breaks out. Soon the children are alone with no power and a depleting supply of food. After months of living on their own they are discovered by the English army and sent to live separately with host families. After what seems like an eternity the cousins are reunited only to find that the war has changed them in more ways than they know.
How I Live Now is a beautifully written story that will keep the reader interested until the end. Meg Rosoff's portrayal of Daisy is truly believable and may even spark memories about the angst of being a teenager. The story deals with some mature issues including sex, incest and anorexia, but is written in a way that is still appropriate for young readers. The only disappointment was that the book came to an end to soon and left me wanting more. I would highly recommend this book for young adult and adult readers. ( )

Synopsis: Living with her extended family all the way over in England in the hope to recover from an eating disorder and get away from family troubles involving her stepmother, 15 year old Daisy is pleasantly surprised with her new life. That is, until war breaks out, and her new family is separated.
My Opinion: This book was written in quite a blunt way, with the use of few commas. It was a quick read with an interesting perspective on England and war. ( )

Meg Rosoff’s acclaimed novel tells the story of Daisy, a teenage American girl who travels to Britain, leaving behind her estranged father and his new family. Sent to stay with her mother’s family in the English countryside, Daisy has to juggle her family problems and eating disorder, while being swept up in a different way of life. She soon grows fond of her eccentric aunt and misfit cousins, especially bonding with the slightly younger Edmund. Everything changes however, when her aunt is out of the country on business. Britain is attacked by some unknown enemy, and left in a chaotic state of war, reminiscent of the country during WW2. The children are left to fend for themselves, providing food and shelter and hiding from the world outside, living and playing in their own little bubble. The war is never far away though, and soon the army arrive, building a base on the farm and separating the children. Daisy is left alone to care for nine year old Piper, and is tormented by her separation from Edmund, with whom she had fallen in love and is determined to find.

Although dealing with war and the delicate subject of love between blood relatives, neither of these is the focus of Rosoff’s story. Rather, they set the scene, and allow the story to follow as it will, through Daisy’s own experiences. She sees some true horror, yet finds in herself a spirit and courage unbeknownst to her.

It is easy to see why this extraordinary book won the Guardian Children’s Fiction award. Rosoff’s writing is remarkable and her storytelling is daring, yet she tackles her subjects with a gentle hand. I can imagine that some readers would be put off by a story that is, in places, quite violent, and that touches on the sexual relationship between two cousins. In Rosoff’s capable hands, this story is a touching one, brimming with emotion, full of beauty and hope. Although I never particularly became attached to any of the characters, the storytelling is so involved that I found myself open-mouthed in horror one minute and holding back tears the next. I'm not sure anything I can say will so this book justice, so you'll just have to read it and make up your own mind.

I for one have been won over by Rosoff’s writing, and will certainly be reading more of her work in the future. A moving read.

This is a haunting story that takes place in an England that has been invaded by an unknown army in a global war waged by unidentified terrorist groups. Daisy has been sent to her deceased mother's relatives in England because she suffers from anorexia, although that term is never used. Her father has a new wife who is expecting and has been convinced that Daisy would be better off with her cousins. However, Daisy's aunt leaves on a quick trip to Sweden just before the war breaks out so the children are on their own indefinitely to run the family farm and look after each other. All the children seem to have a telepathic connection which makes their bonds closer than ordinary cousins so none are them are shocked when Daisy falls hopelessly in love with her cousin Edmond. The first several weeks of her stay are spent in a romantic trance without the oversight or counsel of parents or community.

Eventually, the children are discovered when the army needs their house for a base. The two girls, Daisy and her 9-year-old cousin Piper, are sent to live with an Army couple while the boys are sent to another location. The rest of the story details Daisy and Piper's struggle to find their way back home to Edmond and his brothers.

The author does an excellent job of putting forth the difficulties of living and surviving in a state of siege in a way that is thought-provoking without being preachy. Daisy's observations of adults and society are often humorous but also honest. An unusual story. I highly recommend it. ( )

Punctuation-unneccesary! Taboos-exposed! Characters-absorbing! Style-relentless! Result-genius!
I can't even remember why I picked this one up off the shelf-it completely cut the queue in my 'to read' pile, but I'm glad it did. A cross between-if you can believe it-Enid Blyton, John Marsden and countless others-all combined by a stream of consciousness prose style and some really engaging characters.
OK, some people will get annoyed that the paragraphs and sentences are the same length, and that she invents compound words rather than using a thesaurus, but it is the extremely authentic voice of 15-year old heroine Daisy that comes through loud and clear on the pages of Meg Rosoff's debut novel.
Set in the not very distant future, Manhattanite Daisy is sent to England to live with her cousins in a rural village in England due to the threat of war. War breaks out, but time seems to stand still during Daisy's first, magical English Summer and for a time the conflict seems far away and quite irrelevant. The storyline disposes with any responsible adults pretty quickly leaving the cousins alone to deal with the confusion and brutality of the war when it finally comes.
To cope, the cousins become very close during this time, and in the case of Daisy and cousin Edmond very, very close. Rosoff's skill is evident as she makes this incestuous relationship seem charming and completely right rather than a little creepy.
The family is separated, both from each other and their home and the second half of the book documents their trials as they attempt to find each other. It's not pretty (what war story is?) but Daisy shows herself to be a resourceful and resilient character with many more nature survival skills than you would expect from a native New Yorker! Daisy is funny too, having the kind of quick wit typical of many much loved literary characters.
I won't give the ending away, but don't be put off by the fact that it's in the teen section. It's themes-though not gratuitously depicted-are for an older teen to adult audience and as there's little to no punctuation you'll have it finished in no time! ( )

Fifteen-year-old Daisy leaves the chaos of a world she knows -- New York -- for a completely new sort of chaos: one with her cousins in England. Desperate to get away from her father and new stepmother, who's pregnant, Daisy hopes she'll find some sort of salvation and calm away from the city.

Instead, she finds herself in the middle of someone else's war.

Daisy resides with Osbert, Edmond, Isaac and their sister Piper, whom Daisy comes to rely on as a source of strength to carry on. After The Enemy invades, Daisy's Aunt Penn is unable to return to her children and niece from a business trip in Norway. Left to their own devices, the kids manage to keep up the daily tasks of running their farm -- and look to people in a neighboring village for news on the war. Time passes with the teens in a state of limbo -- there's no adult to order them about, but there's also dwindling food supplies. It's in this state of freedom -- their absolute isolation -- that Daisy is finally able to acknowledge the feelings she has for Edmond, sleepy-eyed and slow to smile. The love she feels for him suddenly eclipses all else.

But then the war comes home. The rag-tag groups of civilian armies in England start to roam the countryside, unsure of their orders in a nation now occupied by enemy forces. The kids are separated -- and what follows is their attempt, often futile, to get back home.

With a stream-of-consciousness style and lack of any quotation marks, How I Live Now serves as Daisy's narrative -- the way she recounts the days, weeks and months that led from her first meeting with cousin Edmond to their wandering around the countryside, starving and desperate, as The Occupation of England raged on. The novel is full of strong, sweeping imagery -- much of it disturbing. There was such a sense of foreboding through the book, I actually felt my hands trembling as Daisy approached a farm, looking for survivors.

I knew this couldn't end well. Or could it?

How I Live Now is simultaneously dreamy, moving, terrifying, surreal and realistic. It's a survivor's story -- and that's not limited to Daisy alone. Anyone growing up in the age of terrorism -- which is all of us -- looks at the world differently, and I could easily see parts of current American culture in the book, which is set in an indeterminate time. The war is never totally explained, though it seems like WWIII, but it doesn't really need to be -- nor does Daisy's obsession with food and starvation, which is eventually altered completely.

The book was a bit disturbing, and I can't imagine I'll re-read it anytime soon. But, like Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, it was an important, powerful story. ( )

Rosoff paints a realistic picture of the toll war takes on children there can be no arguing that. It is ugly and violent and at some points gruesome but it is also what one would imagine the ravages of war would be those so young. It was not difficult to read these circumstances, however, as the author was careful to craft scenes with just enough detail to allow the reader to imagine some of the children’s surroundings.

What the reader might find most compelling is the portrayal of the children’s fight for survival. How they manage everything from food and water to home security. Though young, they are shown as keenly intelligent and creative, cautious to navigate their precarious circumstances wisely and with great care. Moreover, it is in the end result, the “where are they now” element that the most satisfaction can be drawn. Without giving away that ending it can be said that it was painted a most believable and emotional way.

While there were passages and elements of the story I thought were too drawn out, the pacing a bit slow, I thought this quietly honest depiction was worthy of reading. It certainly puts a face on how children manage the diversity of war without being over the top in violence and gore. If a parent is looking for a book to educate their child of such real-life circumstances I’d certainly recommend How I Live Now. ( )

Daisy is a New York City teenager, wise beyond her years, bitter about her father's new wife, jaded, and anorexic. Her father sends her to England to spend the summer with her aunt and cousins Osbert, Edmond, Isaac, and Piper. The book is set in a future where terrorists are invading countries and starting very different kinds of war. This is a love story with a bit of an ick factor, but the author handles that in a way that continues to carry the reader along, and it is also a story of survival in a world where one day you have everything, and the next, nothing. Excellent first novel. ( )

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... ( )

An intriguing yet strange story of a girl who falls in love with her cousin and what happens to her new-found family once a war breaks out in England. It's a story of survival and self-exploration. It makes the reader both uncomfortable and interested at the same time. ( )

Another in a long list of young adult books that I'd recommend to anyone of any age. It begins with themes of eating disorders and rejection and moves on to love, loss, war, and family. It ends more like Victorian redemptive fiction, suggesting that the reader grow with the story, but is compulsively readable and, even when harrowing the reader with yet another setback for the young narrator, also enormously touching. ( )

What a beautiful book. Daisy, a 15 year old New Yorker who suffers from anorexia, is sent to live with her aunt and cousins in the England countryside. After only being there for a few days, war erupts and forces the family to fend for themselves and, eventually, find their way back home after an evacuation. Beautifully written, tender and fascinating, this book captured my interest right from the start and never let go. I felt sympathetic for all the characters and really grew to root for their survival. The book would make for excellent discussions with groups of teens - either in a classroom setting or book group. ( )

I would give this book six stars if I could. It left me emotionally exhausted but hopeful and feeling like a different person than I was when I started. It is rare that a book effects me as deeply as this one did. I've never read anything quite like it before. It's intense, but well worth it. ( )

Daisy is sent from New York to England to spend the summer with her Aunt Penn and her cousins. While in England there is an invasion with devastating consequences for the family. Daisy and her cousins do what they have to in order to survive.

A wonderful story of love, survival and how people cope in the face of adversity. ( )

This is a gripping novel about what would happen if war were to hit in modern times. Set just outside London Daisy goes to see her cousins. Her Aunt decides to go to London for a few days, and this is when the war breaks out. The kids are left all alone, and the horrors of war take them. ( )

Summary:
How I live now takes place in England after teenage Daisy is sent there to stay with her aunt, two male cousins, and their little sister. Everything seems normal even after her aunt leaves because she has 'Important Work to Do Related to the Peace Process.' Everything changes when the war erupts and hits home living death, destruction and scars so deep in the heart that can never be forgotten.

Michael L. Printz Aware (WON) 2005

One of the great privilege of being a trainee teacher is getting to read YA novels with no shame. This is a great book, sweet, tenderly written, and most amazingly, it deals with a teenager's unconventional relationship and recovery from anorexia without being preachy. It's a book about the dragging, everyday reality of war. There's not much else like it. ( )

Haunting, but brilliant. The voice is spot-on for a 15-year-old who is rebelling against the possibility of an evil stepmother. Daisy is a clever girl, and funny to boot. It was an absolute pleasure hearing what she had to say about the world.

I always enjoy juicy little bits of foreshadowing that whet your appetite for what’s to come. So on the first page, I had a hunch I was going to like this book a lot:

"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." ( )

How I Live Now begins with the 15-year-old and obviously troubled Daisy arriving in England to spend the summer with her aunt and four cousins that she barely knows. Leaving life in New York where the weight of people's pity that her mother died in childbirth combined with life with her "evil" and now pregnant step-mother is a relief for Daisy whose desperation to be loved mixes all up with using self-starvation as a weapon against parents who don't seem to understand. Daisy finds solace at her Aunt Penn's isolated farmhouse where her odd but affectionate cousins wrap her up in their idyllic world where school consists of reading books and communication is totally possible even outside the limitation of speech.

As the summer wears on, Daisy is sure that she's found a place she can belong in the Back of Beyond with her cousins, Osbert, the eldest, who feels some responsibility for the rest but can't be troubled to do much about it; Piper, the youngest, who eagerly sweeps Daisy into their lives with her disarming sweetness; and twins Isaac and Edmond, the former who seems to be able to talk to animals but is strikingly wordless among people and the latter who Daisy feels a bit more for than is generally acceptable in a cousinly relationship. Even as Daisy begins to live her truest life, it is crumbling around her as a war sneaks into the countryside, upending all of their lives forever.

How I Live Now is beyond description. The summary covers only the barest bones of a story that is surprisingly unique and oddly magical. Daisy is a brilliant teen narrator, obviously damaged and cynical when it comes to her life thus far and also desperately vulnerable and in need of love in a way few around her seem to understand. Her narration races along in stream of consciousness style with capital letters used frequently for emphasis in a way that is decidedly teenage. It crackles with insight and captures her cousins from an outsider's inside point of view, picking up on their sort of spiritual wavelength even when she is yet unable to be a part of it.

The beginning of the story paints her Aunt's run-down country farmhouse like a paradise and her cousins like Daisy's long lost soulmates, just as Daisy must see them. So, then, it is that much more jarring when a war begins in a decidedly non-traditional sense, slowly slashing paradise to pieces, separating the cousins, and subjecting them all to the harsh realities of an ultimately violent enemy Occupation. Even then, though, Daisy is finding herself and living a truer life than ever before as she discovers real love and learns that she would do anything to live for it. ( )

in a sentence: A 15 year old is faced with starvation and desperation while discovering true love and family all at the same time.

Daisy is a teenage girl with an evil stepmother, a nonchalant father, and an eating disorder. After she is shipped off to live with her never before seen cousins in England, her journey begins. She (and the reader) encounter mystically intriguing characters with a lifestyle completely unlike her own. Much to her own surprise, she fits right in with them, and falls in love with them all in their own way. The peaceful country landscape creates a serene start for this story, before everything changes thanks to war.

The journey we as the reader experience through Daisy is incredible, to say the least. She falls in love with her cousin, learns how to be a farm girl, and begins to learn about the mother who died in birth - all before the "real" story begins. The vivid emotions and experiences described by Daisy are scary, sad, exhausting, and completely enthralling. A young adult reader would be drawn in by her writing, her view of others, and her private thoughts that are all so authentic. The author doesn't shy away from gruesome details of war or the struggle that they face every day. The raw emotions are always present in the novel, which I think really sets it apart. While the emotions present are what really make the story consistently raw and real, there are elements of the journey we can't understand. It is this lack of understanding experienced both by Daisy and the reader, combined with the raw unusual language and punctuation and the wide array of emotions, that make the novel something haunting and amazing. ( )