How I Live Now begins when prickly, slouchy, grumpy, badly-dressed teen Daisy-Elisabeth arrives in England, where she’s to spend the summer with her feral cousins on their chaotic and filthy Somerset farm. But as she travels through Heathrow, we realise something is seriously wrong with the status quo; Paris has been attacked (by terrorists?) and the UK is under virtual military curfew. So when a nuclear bomb is detonated over London, Daisy has to adjust to the new reality of no-ipod-no-hot-water post-apocalypse Britain….
At least that’s what I thought it was going to be about, having read the blurb. It wasn’t. It was, instead, a second rate, whiny, melodramatic teen romance between Daisy and her apparently mentally challenged cousin. The escalating scenes of war and unrest are restrained and actually pretty well done on the whole (though no-one ever really explains what’s happening out there in the real world). But the romance stuff between cousins is wooden and icky and awful. I wanted to ground them both, confiscate their mobile phones and ban internet access for a month. What a waste. Dreadful.