Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10222 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Possibly one of the most talked about books of the year, Meg Rosoff’s novel for young adults is the winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize 2004. Heralded by some as the next best adult crossover novel since Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, who himself has given the book a thunderously good quote, this author’s debut is undoubtedly stylish, readable and fascinating.

Rosoff’s story begins in modern day London, slightly in the future, and as its heroine has a 15-year-old Manhattanite called Daisy. She’s picked up at the airport by Edmond, her English cousin, a boy in whose life she is destined to become intricately entwined. Daisy is staying for the summer in her Aunt Penn’s country farmhouse with Edmond and her other cousins. They spend some idyllic weeks together--often alone with Aunt Penn away travelling in Norway. Daisy’s cousins seem to have an almost telepathic bond, and Daisy is mesmerised by Edmond and soon falls in love with him.

But their world changes forever when an unnamed aggressor invades England and begins a years-long occupation. Daisy is parted from Edmond when soldiers take over their home, and Daisy and Piper, her younger cousin, must travel to another place to work. Their experiences of occupation are never kind and always hard. Daisy’s pain, living without Edmond, is tangible.

Rosoff’s writing style is both brilliant and frustrating. Her descriptions and ability to portray the emotions of her characters are wonderful. Her long sentences and total lack of speech marks for dialogue is, however, exhausting. Her narrative is deeply engaging and yet a bit unbelievable. The end of the book is dramatic, but too sudden. The book has a raw, unfinished feel about it, yet that somehow adds to the experience of reading it. It’s flawed but unmissable. (Age 14 and over) --John McLay

Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
a magical and utterly faultless voice

Time Out
the best children's novel for adults since The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Customer Reviews

A triumph of hype over style
Forty thousand words. There's a plot in there somewhere - maybe even a half decent one - but it's so smothered by clumsy, self-consciously 'yoof' vernacular that it's just lost. Characters come across as ill-formed (due to a lack of contextual detail); the action rambles, and the 'shocking' love story is synthetic and unconvincing.

Writing in paragraph-long sentences with Random Capitalisation and no, like, proper punctuation is not Big or Clever it does not make a weak story Good it just makes it Hard To Read and in places Unintelligible. While some scenes are well written, the overall effect is one of a novel brewed up in a blender then strained through a sieve to get out anything that smacks of gramatic convention. The irony is that while this is supposed to be the writing of a 'yoof', any youngster who is that profoundly illiterate would be unlikely to ever think of writing a book.

It's good that authors and publishers try to break the mould now and then, but it takes a big talent to pull it off. Rosoff (in this book at least) does not show that talent. Here we have a book made successful by newspaper reviewers and prize-givers who are too 'hip' to realise that beneath the Emperor's New Clothes there really ain't that much worth looking at.

Nice try, but more effort needed.

Good, if you can ignore the lack of grammar.
This, I've got to confess, is one of my favourite books: I enjoyed it so much I've read it several times. I've only given it four stars, however, for a few reasons:
- the writing style is very difficult to get on with. At the end (no spoilers, I promise) Daisy says something about how she "scribbled everything down" and it's implied that it was too painful for her to go over what she'd written. But I only picked this up the third or fourth time I read it.
- sometimes you get the feeling there's 'a bit much going on': like the war, and Daisy's insecurities, and her relationship with Edmond, and the psychic thing. Perhaps some of it needed to either be elaborated on more or just left out.

I'll be brutally honest. It doesn't come across as a very well-written book. There is no punctuation whatsoever (apart from the odd full stop) until the last six chapters. Speech, for example, isn't in quotation marks but rather Has Every First Letter Of A Word In Capitals. If this is going to irritate you, my advice is just to not bother with the book at all. Although I think this was deliberate, I think there could have been better ways to get the message across.

But the fact that I've now lost count of how many times I've read it speaks for itself. Personally I think it is wonderful - it's beautifully sad and I cry every time I read it. If you can look past the lack of grammar you'll probably enjoy it too.

A fish out of water tale with a twist
This superb novel starts off fairly conventionally as 15 yr old New Yorker and anorexic Daisy is sent off to stay with her English cousins while her hated step-mom has a baby (Daisy's mom had died giving birth to her). Needless to say, the cousins are unconventional but Daisy starts to slot in and soon falls for Edmond. Her Aunt has to go to Oslo for a conference, leaving the kids to fend for themselves, and things start happening. A series of terrorist attacks mean the borders are closed and Aunt Penn can't get back. Then 'the enemy' takes the country, and the kids are split up to be billeted elsewhere. The rest of the story is how Daisy and nine year old Piper survive and try to get home and find the brothers amidst carnage in the countryside.
Unconventional in style, the first person story has the dialogue blended into the narrative with no punctuation, and important things are capitalised - as a New Yorker would!? But you quickly get used to it.
It was the introduction of the alternate time-line as the country is invaded that takes you by surprise after you're lulled into security by the bucolic setting which is reminiscent of a modern day 'Cold Comfort Farm'. I would have loved to have heard more about the boy's experiences, but it is Daisy's story after all. She and Piper manage to overcome tragedy and hardship, discovering hidden reserves to get home, only for Daisy to be whisked away back to the USA as soon as reach their goal. So the last section sees Daisy return to her cousins after several years recovery. But for this cop-out ending I would have given five stars, but it is a great read for teenagers and adults alike.