Summary & Evaluation: Sent to live in the English countryside with her maternal aunt's family because she can't get along with her stepmother, Daisy soon falls in love with her cousin Edmond (the aunt isn't around to stop this--she's stuck in Oslo and never returns home) and lives an idyllic lifestyle in the remote countryside. Soon "the war" sweeps in and divides the family--Daisy with her younger cousin Piper and Edmond with his brother Isaac--forcing them to confront the harsh realities of an occupied England. Eventually they reunite and live their lives together again, but the war has taken its toll and their innocence has been lost.
how i live now is a mix between Mad Max and Lord of the Flies with a little bit of The Blue Lagoon thrown in for a love story. Okay, maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but it's the best way I can describe it in under 30 words. There were two things that I really liked about this book: one, that the subjects it deals with were pretty off-the-wall; and, two, it employs a quirky narrative form, using the method of presenting Daisy's diary/confession writing (but she doesn't like to use quotation marks and creates so many run-on sentences that she'd have any writing teacher begging her to stop). All in all, it was just a really enjoyable read that grabbed my attention at the beginning (a chain-smoking, mind-reading cousin who drives on the wrong side of the road? cool . . .) and kept it throughout.
Booktalk Hook: Since a lot of the book's appeal is Daisy's voice, I'd have to read a selection of the book for the booktalk. So I'd read pages 3-4, where Daisy is picked up by Edmond at the airport--a passage that pretty well sets the scene for the rest of the book.
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