With the Brighton Shakedown Festival still pounding on outside my windows, and tons of environmental law reading to do on my desk, finding out about the How I Live Now film was the second best thing of my day (losing out narrowly to watching the latest episode of Scandal).According to Shelfari, I last read How I Live Now in 2007, with my first reading several years prior. I love this book. Testament to this is the fact that I actually remember most of the salient points about the plot, which I normally don't with the majority of books I read. Basically, fifteen-year-old Daisy is sent from America to live with the aunt and four cousins that she's never met (one cousin is cut from the film). Her aunt goes away on business shortly after Daisy arrives, and it's the beginning of a summer that she'll never forget, that changes her life irrevocably forever. Alongside falling in love, World War Three breaks out and despite being tucked away in the English countryside, Daisy and her cousins aren't immune from harm. Unfortunately, I don't remember how the book ends, but now I'm itching to get my hands on a copy and find out all over again.
This is a beautiful book. Strange, yes, it's got that in bucketloads, but beautiful all the same. Now, nine years after it was first published, the film is being released. I'm curious about how they tackled the film. From the trailer, it looks like that for the most part, it's a fairly accurate adaptation; one thing I don't remember is Daisy being so tomboy-ish. That said, for practical reasons (i.e. not having more hours in the day, and already being behind on work despite only having had one week back at uni) I'm highly unlikely to actually see it in the cinema, for which I'm really sad about. Let me know if you've seen it, and what you think!
Image courtesy of Fantastic Fiction.
