Entry tags:

books, books:!2010, books:!young adult, books:rosoff meg

Title: How I Live Now
Author: Meg Rosoff
Number of Pages: 194 pages
Book Number/Goal: 14/30 for 2010
My Rating: 3.5/5

When fifteen-year-old New Yorker Daisy gets sent to England to live with her aunt and cousins, she doesn't expect a war to break out. People have been talking about the possibility of war for the past several years and nothing's ever come of it. But while her aunt is at a conference in Europe, England is invaded and Daisy and her cousins have to survive on their own. At first it doesn't seem that bad, out on their farm in their little village, but when the farm is taken over by soldiers, Daisy and her cousin Piper are sent away to stay with a family in another village while her male cousins, including Edmond, whom she's fallen in love with, are sent somewhere else. In their new home, Daisy fishes for clues to where Edmond and the others are, and eventually as the occupation grows worse and worse, she and Piper decide to set out and see if they can find them.

I liked the writing style a lot, very conversational first-person, but without so much of the info-dumpiness that often seems to go along with that. The earlier chapters when the cousins are all just hanging out at the house and doing their thing remind me of a lot of books I read as a kid set during WWII or around the turn of the century (though those were usually with younger kids).

Two things kept me from really loving this book, both of which are vaguely spoilery. The first is the random psychic kids. At first I didn't think we were supposed to take it literally, but as the book goes on, it's obvious that they are actually psychic, and it just feels kind of weird and pasted on from a different story.

The other is the time jump, which just didn't work for me. Everything up til then was great, even with the random psychicness, but I just didn't feel like the ending held up as well as the rest of the book at all.

Anyway, I did enjoy it quite a bit, despite that.