How I Live Now

Reviewed by Jamie Starbuck – HMP Long Lartin

Daisy’s new stepmother is pregnant and hates her, so she contrives to send her packing from Manhattan to stay with the new age relatives in England. The day after Daisy arrives her aunt goes away on business and Daisy is left with her cousins. They’re all so different and a bit ‘wacky’ and, shock, she falls in love with her cousin. This book is all very ‘tweenage’ at first and it isn’t helped by the fact that it’s narrated by a stroppy and immature 15 year-old American. I had to keep reminding myself that it is set in the present and not pre-war, due to its ‘spiffiness’ and the setting of living self-sufficiently on a farm.

But then: Something happens and suddenly there’s a tonal shift and we’re thrust into an entirely different book, namely ‘Swallows and Amazons Go To War’. There appears to be some form of vague plot hatched by nefarious invaders that is never really fully explained – the isolation of the farm helps keep everybody, reader included, in relative darkness. The elec- tricity goes down and, apparently, the only real consequence is that there is no longer any emails. This allows the absent adults to have even less participation in their children’s carefree existence.

And then the tone is turned all the way up to ‘grim’ and everybody grows up. This is sold as a book for young adults, and maybe I’m getting old. I wouldn’t let my teenage child (if I had one) read this book. From its Enid Bly- ton-type beginning it suddenly gets very Orwellian – perhaps ‘Five Go On A Picnic Through Dante’s Inferno’. The shift in style is so wild and dramatic that when the abject horror of the characters new existence takes form it is like reading two different books.