How I Live Now

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

Rating: 3 out of 5

Summary (Off the back of the Book)
Fifteen-year-old Daisy thinks she knows all about love.
Her mother died giving birth to her, and now her dad has sent her away for the summer to live in the English countryside with her cousins she's never even met.
There she'll discover what real love is: something violent, mysterious and wonderful. There her world will be turned upside down and a perfect summer will explode into a million bewildering pieces.
How will Daisy live then?

Review
First and for most I feel that I have an obligation to warn you that this book refuses to acknowledge the importance of speech marks, as in there aren't any! I was NOT warned about this and I have to admit it did take a little getting used to. Not one of those books you can skip to the dialogue with, as you'll no doubtingly miss half of it! Now that that's out of the way I can get on with the review.

There seems to be a lot of setting the scene and if I'm completely honest I was about ready to give up on it and self it with the rest of my Not Worth Finishing books. However, towards the middle it quickly picked up the pace and I wasn't able to put it down. Even though I found it slow getting off the ground looking back you can see why it was important as without it you wouldn't have cared what happened to the characters as the story progressed.

As far as the YA love story, that comes from a rather unlikely source, which again takes a little getting used to. At times I found myself a verging on uncomfortable with the romantic side of things due to the fact everyone is widely underage and in some shape or form related to each other. Although, saying that, Rosoff finds a way of making you look beyond that and get's you hooked on Daisy's journey as she tried to find her way home.

I wot give anything away but I did wont to say that no matter how I felt about the rest of the book the second half, especially the ending, was heartbreakingly brilliant and I can see how it won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize back in 2004.

Character to look out for: Piper.
For me she was the heart of this story, well, her and her goat Ding.


Official trailer for the film:

WARNING there are a couple of quite MASSIVE plot changes in the movie. Whether it makes it better or not? Well i'll let you decide.