How I Live Now is the book everyone over 12 should read this summer. Like this year’s Carnegie Medal winner, Jennifer Donnelly’s A Gathering Light, it’s a classic-in-waiting about the experience of being young and trying to make sense of a world ruled badly by adults.

Meg Rosoff’s narrator, Daisy, is a New Yorker trapped in a contemporary or near-future England under enemy occupation. Like Mattie Gokey, the narrator of A Gathering Light, she is a motherless teenager who is forced to be resourceful and brave.

Unlike Mattie, a logger’s daughter born early in the 20th century who has to fight all the way for her education, Daisy was not born into a world in which her hopes and dreams were of little consequence. But the book’s setting makes her aware of her relative powerlessness and she has to acquire Mattie’s skill of seizing control of her life even as her world falls apart.nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;

Read this review in fullnbsp;in this week’s TES

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