Actual rating: 3.5 "I guess there was a war going on somewhere in the world that night but it wasn’t one that could touch us."Recommended with some reservations.I read this book on accident. By "accident," I don't mean I mistakenly read a book instead when I thought I had been playing Plants vs. Zombies 2 I'm not that stupid, I meant that I picked up this book thinking the story would be something else. During World War II in England, there was an operation to evacuate children from the larger cities to more rural areas of England to keep them safe from possible airstrikes from the Axis forces. This has been the basis of some stories I've enjoyed, most notably in the Narnia series, and the Noel Streatfield novel When the Sirens Wailed. I've also watched my fair share of TV episodes based on this premise, so that is the reason why I started reading this book.I thought this was going to be a book based on a WWII evacuation. I clearly didn't read the word "MANHATTAN" in the freaking first sentence of the summary, nor did I see the "SCI-FI" tag, because I sometimes have an annoying tendency to read only what I want to see. Still, the premise is an interesting one, so I continued with the book. It didn't sound so bad at all, really, quite solidly in my forte when I think about it. A war, survival, love, maturity...all up my forte. Cousinly love? Whatever, I've got no problems with that in fiction, as long as it's believably built. Hell, I've read my fair share of worst incestuous relationships. This book just might turn out awesomely after all, despite not being what I initially signed up for.This was a short book, but within the first 25 pages, I was sure I would give this book a 2. Things improved, but it took a good 50% of the book for me to begin enjoying it.The problem is the narrator, Elizabeth (known throughout this book as Daisy). She is a 15 year old originally from Manhattan, and my first impression of her was not good. She was a little bitch. I hated her for most of the book. Her narrative was what gave me so much trouble; she is so selfish, so self-centered, so utterly self-absorbed. I didn't like her, I didn't trust her, and to me, she was an unreliable narrator because her view of the world is so skewed...as in completely focused upon ME ME ME."No matter how much you put on a sad expression and talked about how awful it was that all those people were killed and what about democracy and the Future of Our Great Nation the fact that none of us kids said out loud was that WE DIDN’T REALLY CARE. Most of the people who got killed were either old like our parents so they’d had good lives already, or people who worked in banks and were pretty boring anyway, or other people we didn’t know."Daisy is spoiled and a pain in the ass. Her mother died giving birth to her, and in essence, Daisy thinks of herself as a murderer, having killed someone as she draws her first breath. Her father remarried a woman named Davina...and Jesus, how Daisy hates Davina."...Davina the Diabolical, who sucked my father’s soul out through his you know what and then got herself knocked up with the devil’s spawn which, when it pops out, Leah and I are going to call Damian even if it’s a girl."Her pettiness and attitude towards her mother is not uncommon, but Daisy's hatred is so spiteful and bitter and over the top that I can't help but hate her for it. Daisy yammers on for a considerable amount of time about how she hates Davina...but it's never made completely clear WHY we should hate Davina so much besides for the very fact that she happened to be the woman who married her father.Oh, and apparently Daisy's got an eating disorder. How did she become this way?"I really tried to explain about at first not wanting to get poisoned by my stepmother and how much it annoyed her and how after a while I discovered I liked the feeling of being hungry and the fact that it drove everyone stark raving mad and cost my father a fortune in shrinks and also it was something I was good at."Yeah...she's not the most likeable character. Her first-person narrative style also drove me crazy. The story is written almost from a stream of consciousness style, and it really annoyed me. Added to my dislike of the main character, and I was not a happy reader for the first half of the book. I just wanted to yell at Daisy "What? Are you too fucking good to use quotation marks for speech like everyone else?"Little bitch. I seriously hated Daisy.She is a really, really self-centered narrator. There is a war going on, she doesn't seem to care. Daisy seems more concerned about her own problems and her *womp womp* sad poor-little-rich-girl life than anyone else around her, even when a bomb goes off in London and the world descends into chaos. For the first half of the book, her descriptions of the war and its devastation are described coldly, impersonally, there is no sense of danger, of mortality, of impending doom. Daisy is so detached from it all, in her own egotistical little mind."That was a bomb that went off in the middle of a big train station in London the day after Aunt Penn went to Oslo and something like seven or seventy thousand people got killed.This obviously went over very badly with the populace at large and was pretty scary etc. but to be honest it didn’t seem to have that much to do with us way off in the country."Everything from the war is described similarly in this impersonal, disinterested manner. It frustrated me to no ends. Daisy does grow up, she does mature...she does wake up from her ostrich-in-the-sand status when things literally hit close to home, and her character grows in complexity, although so gradually that I hardly noticed it happening myself. I actually enjoyed the subtlety of her character development.I did not like the other characters in this book. I didn't feel like anyone else besides Daisy had a personality besides herself, most likely because Daisy's personality is so obnoxious that it overpowers everything surrounding it. Piper is the perfect princess, Isaac is the autistic twin, Osbert is the pompous prick of an older brother, Edmond is the *clutches pearl* cousinly love interest...and he is just dull.I have nothing against incest in fiction, I really don't. Cousin-cousin relationships are even less shocking, but there is a way of building up these sorts of relationships to make them believable and I just did not buy the concept of Daisy & Edmond in this book. Edmond is just...weird. He's a short little 14-year old who was smoking a cigarette when they first met, and he seems to be able to read Daisy's mind. Edmond was such a creepy character for me, and their interactions were so limited so that when they began a physical relationship, I was utterly astounded at how fast and how wrong it felt. It's not the nature of the cousin/cousin relationship that bothers me, it's the implausibility of it.My favorite part about the book---when it FINALLY came---was the survival aspect. Without the knowledge that this book is set in present-time, this book could easily have been set in the 1940s, there is a timelessness in how it feels, but that's perhaps intrinsic in a story of this nature. Working for the war effort, struggling to find resources, banding together to help one another, facing the immediate danger from home, as well as from the enemy. All these, I reveled in. The latter half of the book was far superior to the first even if I was disappointed by the book overall.
For me this seems a swirling together of four different books. Firstly a book of enormous lyricism and poetry – about people, about landscapes, about relationships and feelings. Secondly a book about a group of children having an adventure, with a journey being an important part of that adventure – it could have been penned by Enid Blyton in this respect. It evoked her world of childhood loyalty and that incredibly warm spirit of companionship. Thirdly it was a book about war, death, fear, loss and human and animal suffering, but this was somewhat subdued. Every now and again it surfaced, but mostly it was just heard at second or third hand. A slight din in the background . Fourthly it was a book about magical realism, with characters who didn’t quite add up (Edmund smoked, and drove a car. Really, could he? I think not.) And he and Daisy communicated in a dream like state, even when miles apart, plus Daisy’s anorexia was treated as a mild foible rather than anything serious. So, it was a little bit strange.Several people have objected to the relationship between Edmund and Daisy, saying it was incestuous. Hum. Wikipedia tells us that 50% of Saudi Arabian marriages are to 1st and 2nd cousins – undoubtedly as a result of this, all states in the Persian Gulf require genetic screening for all couples. The BBC has said that 55% of British Pakistans are married to 1st cousins. Even our Victorian hero Charles Darwin and his wife were first cousins. I don’t think it’s the perfect situation, but it sometimes happens. Especially as in this instance Daisy and Edmund did not know one another. They were not brought up as ‘family’, with the taboos this usually engenders in western cultures.I was quite addicted to reading this book, and found it hard to put down. For me it was an odd story, quite unlike things I normally read, (maybe because I don’t usually read dystopian novels.) But it was happy, sad, enchanting and gripping. Most of all I am left with a taste of the warmth and caring between the characters, and the lovely lyrical qualities of the writing. I thought it was a great read.
What do You think about How I Live Now (2004)?
I really loved this book. Daisy is a vivid, compelling narrator - she reminds me of Cassandra Mortmain from I Capture the Castle in some ways - indomitable will and dry wit and the ability to be clear-eyed even when it hurts or is at her own expense - and her story is heartbreaking and utterly engaging. I was in tears by the end. The writing is sharp and insightful and funny, and it carries the story forward inexorably, and I couldn't look away even when I was afraid of what was going to happen - I really worried for all of them, but especially for Edmond and Piper. The whole story, and especially the ending, is full of heartbreak and hope. Highly recommended.
—victoria.p
I’m not going to lie, y’all. Sometimes I read a book solely so that I have something add to a particular Goodreads shelf that I feel is being neglected. So when I saw How I Live Now on a display at work, I was like, “Wait… wait… is that the one where the world is ending and the main character has sexytimes with her cousin? I COULD READ IT AND ADD IT TO MY INCEST SHELF!”So I did.But here’s the thing! My sole knowledge of this book was it won a Printz and was full of illegal touches, but actually it was so much more. I don’t want to say that Daisy making out with Edmond wasn’t part of the story, but because we were seeing everything from Daisy’s own point of view, it didn’t seem like a problem. Like okay, this isn’t exactly what one would have planned, but now that it’s here why bother making a fuss over it?Now let’s try to understand that falling into sexual and emotional thrall with an underage blood relative hadn’t exactly been on my list of Things To Do while visiting England, but I was coming around to believe that whether you liked it or not, Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just have to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.The same thing happened with Daisy’s eating disorder—it was barely touched on, because Daisy just didn’t give enough of a shit to bring it up in her story. It just got hinted at, here and there, like, “We’d both been bitten by something or other in the night and it didn’t improve my mood to have a face covered in itching welts and wild hair and no toothbrush and also to feel so grubby from not having a bath in ages. I was glad I was too thin to get my period because that would have pushed me over the edge.” No big deal.And past all that, we have Idyllic English Countryside Torn Apart By An Unclearly-Defined War (because again, Daisy’s a foreign outsider without much background knowledge about this whole war nonsense, and also she’s really busy making gooshy eyes at Edmond and petting lambs with Isaac and going swimming with Piper and basically being fifteen and unsupervised) and Cousins Separated By Violence and Daisy And Piper Fighting For Survival In The Wilderness and there are hallucinogenic mushrooms and massacres and it’s all exciting/awful and super readable.Daisy and Piper end up stealing the show away from the boys—Piper is, of course, totally accepting of Daisy’s relationship with her brother, and is clearly the person you want to have along in a crisis (even if that crisis involves racing through English hedgerows in an attempt to escape a war zone). She knows everything, for all that she’s nine, and flits around being Wood Nymphy and foraging for berries and coaxing honey from angry bees and whatnot. Daisy is very much, “What the fuck, okay, point me in the direction of some potatoes that need to be dug up, I guess, because I’m not much good at the rest of this outdoorsy crap,” but she provides the Semi-Adult Stability that Piper definitely needs, so it all evens out.The ending was not at all what I expected but completely acceptable, and the writing is not at all what I expected but fantaaaaastic. Seriously, I loved the way the book is written. It takes a page or two to fall into the flow of endless run-on sentences and a wild lack of quotation marks, but after you adjust it’s just like you’re listening to Daisy tell you all about this totally effed-up summer she spent in England, and it’s awesome. Seriously, why aren’t you reading this book? It’ll take, like, an hour! Go forth immediately and enjoy!
—Monica!
3 to 3.5 Stars First thought after finishing the book: Boy, this book was weird.Second thought: What a weird book.Third thought: So freaking weird.Skipping my next fifty thoughts let me try to actually talk about something other than the weirdness of this book.How I Live Now is essentially a survival story but it doesn’t begin as one, we get a snarky Manhattan resident protag sent off to England to live with her cousins where she surprises everyone by adjusting very easily with them. So, at first I thought this book would be about whiny-teenager-living-in-countryside but then she falls for her doggy-like cousin (her words, not mine) and they start doing the deed because no one’s around to object. Well, now I was led to believe that this book would be about an incestuous relationship, which I’m not really fond of but I went on reading anyway. All of a sudden people started running around and running away from gunfires and bombs and this book unexpectedly turned into a Quest for Survival. The real charm of this book lies in its narration which is kept very simple and honest, while reading you would get the feel of a 15-year old who has some issues in her head narrating it. This narration contributes to more than half of the weirdness of this book. The heroine is neither a Mary Sue nor a kickbutt diva, she is just a teenager with some issues of her own. She touches very briefly upon her weight issue and visits to a psychiatrist but she develops into a responsible person while saving her cousin from the wrath of war. Despite liking several things about this book I don’t feel like awarding it anything more than 3.5 stars and certainly not a Printz award but what do ya know? Some people think this book was brilliant.I enjoy war survival stories but I just don’t see anything greatly special about How I Live Now, I wouldn’t even go around recommending it because it’s only catch is the “freak” factor and nothing more. I was quite disappointed by the ending which I’m going to spoiler mark, don’t read it if you plan on reading this book.(view spoiler)[ See, here’s the thing. I don’t believe that teenage love lasts forever. She fell in “love” with her cousin Edmond in three months but carried on that love for six whole years. Six years?! What, she didn’t date anybody else all this time because the cousin she feel for ages ago was the one? I don’t believe that. I would have liked her to move over him, not go back and decide to live with him. I don’t know, doesn’t settle well with me, maybe it’s the ick factor incest brings but I did not like the way it ended. (hide spoiler)]
—Anushka
