Piper is Aunt Penn's only daughter and Daisy's cousin. She is the youngest of the family and has an almost angelic essence to her. Daisy feels protective of her and acts as her mother when Aunt Penn is away. Words that would describe Piper would be energetic, sweet and innocent. A little later when all the others were talking she put her hand on my arm and said in a low voice just to me that she wished my mother were here to see how I’d turned into such a vivid person and I thought Vivid? that’s a pretty strange word to choose, and I wondered if what she actually meant to say was Screwed Up. But then again maybe not because she didn’t seem like the type to sit around thinking up ways to be bitchy, unlike some people I know. Violence- bullet wounds can be seen in characters heads, especially two 14 year olds. There is a war going on so obviously there is going to be plenty of violence. The movie is a very dark and gory portrayal of the horrors of war. It starts out like the book, but it takes a sharp turn after the bomb drops. I didn’t mean to sleep practically a whole day and a night but I did. And when I woke up I thought how strange it was to be lying in someone else’s bed thousands of miles from home surrounded by grayish light and a weird kind of quiet that you never get in New York City where the traffic keeps you company in a constant buzzy way day and night.

It is Daisy's voice - spiky, defiant and vulnerable - that makes this novel; it also ensures that it is so compelling and delightful. Although Daisy can be an unreliable narrator, especially when it comes to things she's not much interested in, such as the details of war, she is also utterly trustworthy. She asked how my father was and said she hadn’t seen him in many years and I told her he was fine except for his taste in girlfriends which was totally un-fine, but he was probably feeling lots better now that I wasn’t around reminding him about it day and night. I didn’t spend much time thinking about the war because I was bored with everyone jabbering on for about the last five years about Would There Be One or Wouldn’t There and I happen to know there wasn’t anything we could do about it anyway so why even bring the subject up. I love the movie, too- it is a brilliant movie. But, don't let your teenagers who love the book watch this movie. Upon returning home, (finally), they see that the military had been using the farmhouse. there is a mattress soaked in blood, maggots all over the kitchen, and signs of vagrants living in the upstairs (drug and alcohol paraphernalia).

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There’s still no Aunt Penn but Edmond introduces me to the rest of my cousins, who are called Isaac and Osbert and Piper, which I won’t even begin to comment on. Isaac is Edmond’s twin, and they look exactly the same, only Isaac’s eyes are green and Edmond’s are the same colour as the sky, which at the moment is gray. At first I liked Piper best because she just looked straight at me and said We are very glad you’ve come Elizabeth. Daisy, I corrected her, and she nodded in a solemn kind of way that made me feel sure she’d remember. I'm not entirely sure how I felt about this. Let me begin by saying that I watched the movie first, several years ago, and somewhat enjoyed it but definitely wouldn't call it a favorite. The book is somewhat in a similar position, but I have to admit that for the most part, I enjoyed the movie more.

But the summer I went to England to stay with my cousins everything changed. Part of that was because of the war, which supposedly changed lots of things, but I can’t remember much about life before the war anyway so it doesn’t count in my book, which this is.

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You know how from time to time a book comes along that you're positive you won't forget about it anytime soon but can't really explain exactly WHY? That's how I feel about How I Live Now and these precious kids. Readers will remain absorbed to the very end by this unforgettable and original story.”— The Bulletin, Starred Leah is Daisy's friend. During Daisy's stay at Aunt Penn's, Leah continually updates Daisy with recent news and events occurring at her school. With a totally different vibe from the more popular cover, this one reminds us a bit of a horror movie.

If you haven't been in a war and are wondering how long it takes to get used to losing everything you think you need or love, I can tell you the answer is no time at all. (c) And he smiles and takes a drag on his cigarette, which even though I know smoking kills and all that, I think is a little bit cool, but maybe all the kids in England smoke cigarettes? I don’t say anything in case it’s a well known fact that the smoking age in England is something like twelve and by making a big thing about it I’ll end up looking like an idiot when I’ve barely been here five minutes. Anyway, he says Mum couldn’t come to the airport cause she’s working and it’s not worth anyone’s life to interrupt her while she’s working, and everyone else seemed to be somewhere else, so I drove here myself. In this podcast, Rosoff explains how Isabella Bird (nineteenth-century English explorer, writer, photographer and naturalist, in case you're not aware) inspired her writing. Images I spent a while considering how I would rate this book, but finally decided on a full 5/5 rating, and here's why: 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.

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She smiled a funny kind of smile just then like she was trying to keep from laughing or maybe crying, and when I looked at her eyes I could see she was on my side which as far as I’m concerned made a nice change and I guess had something to do with my mother being her younger sister who died. What a weird little book! Granted, I am into weird, but "How I Live Now" just wasn't my kind of weird I guess. There was a fair amount of arguing and talking at lunch and except for talking to me she didn’t get too involved but kind of observed, and overall I’d have to say that the main feeling you got from her was that she was a little distracted, I suppose because of the work she was doing. However, life begins to change when Aunt Penn leaves the children alone for a few days to attend an anti-war conference in Oslo. That same day, a huge bomb is detonated in London, killing dozens of people. After the bomb detonates, occupying soldiers rush into England, and a full-fledged war begins. As soldiers make their way deeper and deeper into the countryside, Daisy expresses her romantic feelings for her cousin, Edmond, who reciprocates them. They begin a teenaged romance, made more dramatic by the fact that Aunt Penn has not come home, and the soldiers are still approaching.

Macdonald made his name with documentaries, One Day in September on the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, and Touching the Void about a failed attempt to scale the Siula Grande in the Andes. The success of his first feature film, The Last King of Scotland, for which Forest Whitaker, as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, won the Best Actor Oscar, saw Hollywood come calling. He had less success condensing the six-part BBC TV serial State of Play into a Washington DC-set feature film starring Russell Crowe and with his historical epic The Eagle about the Roman invasion of Britain. He followed them with a couple more documentaries – the user-generated Life in a Day and Marley, about the reggae star. And then he looked at me again in his funny doggy way, and he said You’ll get used to it. Which was strange too, because I hadn’t said anything out loud. 3 And frankly, despite my criticisms here, Rosoff does have some really nice lines. She writes with a sincerity that makes you really want to believe Daisy knows what she's doing (in the sense that it makes sense) with Edmond, and with her earlier issues with Bulimia (see why I said she was troubled?).Later when I get a chance to look around the house I find out the inside is much more jumbled up than the outside with funny corridors that don’t seem to lead anywhere and tiny bedrooms with slanty ceilings hidden away at the top of stairs. The stairs all creak and there are no curtains on any of the windows and all the main rooms seem huge after what I’m used to and they’re scattered with big old comfortable furniture and paintings and books and huge fireplaces you can walk into and animals posing around the place to make it look even more authentic oldy worldy.