Meg Rosoff: How I Live Now

The so-called "crossover" novel is, by its very nature, difficult to determine just for whom it is intended. These are the novels that manage to find an audience with both children or teenagers, and with adults. It is a genre that has become increasingly popular with publishers and has been given considerable impetus by the willingness of adults to join the ranks of Harry Potter fans.

Once it was expected that, while teenagers would read and study adult novels (think about the books you studied in the senior years of high school), adults would only read a children's book for professional reasons, or because they were reading it to their own offspring.

How times have changed. Adults will now happily admit to reading books published for children or teenagers. Some, such as Jennifer Donnelly's A Gathering Light (2004 winner of the famous Carnegie Medal) are published for teenagers but find an avid readership among adults. A first-time author has joined the ranks of those writing for an audience that has no clearly defined age limit. How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff, has been published for young adults, but it would be a great shame if adults don't read this beautifully-written, compelling novel as well.

How I Live Now is the story of 15-year-old Daisy. Daisy, an apparently sophisticated and self-assured New Yorker, is refusing to make any attempt to accommodate her father's new, pregnant wife, and is also struggling with an eating disorder. She is packed off to England to stay in a rambling country house with her aunt and delightfully eccentric cousins.

A warm and accepting family is just what Daisy needs in her troubled life, and at first the summer seems an idyll of fishing and lazing about. Aunt Penn, who has an unidentified role as an international peacekeeper, is sent overseas to work on negotiations to avert a threatened war. Daisy and her cousins are free from adult supervision to spend the summer as they wish. For Daisy and her 14-year-old cousin Edmond, it is a chance to explore their growing attraction to each other.

However, the war turns out to be a reality, not a rumour. A bomb explodes at a major train station in London. Daisy casually reports, "Something like 7000 or 70,000 people got killed." Distanced from the action, even the detailed media coverage can't make it seem real to her. The only impact is that her Aunt Penn can't fly back home, and the children face a summer of freedom.

At first the war seems a bit of a game and Daisy and her cousins play at survival. But as hostilities continue, the war begins to make itself felt in unexpected ways. Emails and text messages bounce back, electricity is unreliable, and local people start to die from commonplace infections because of the shortage of antibiotics.

Finally the house is sequestered by the army and the children are split up and sent to separate accommodation. Daisy and her 9-year-old cousin Piper are housed together, and it becomes Daisy's mission to get them both back home to the other cousins.

The opening of this book - light-hearted, humorous, flippant - makes the descent into the violence of war even more shocking.

War, for Daisy, can no longer be dismissed as something that happens to people she doesn't know. It has a direct impact on her and on people she knows and loves.

The ending of the book offers a glimmer of hope, but acknowledges that there are no quick fixes or easy solutions for lives that have been so devastatingly altered.

Publisher: Penguin

Price: $24.99

Age: 12-16 yrs

Recommended by: Jenni Keestra