Published 30 June 2005
This is the kind of book that I want to hide in the freezer because even looking at the cover turns me into a complete wreck. I've never read anything by Rosoff before now and it seems like this is just the beginning. My brain can't quite process how a book can be so devastating and yet so beautiful all at once that the lines blur between them and it just is.
Daisy is a smart, seemingly self absorbed girl, exiled from the Upper West Side to the English countryside to stay with her aunt and cousins, by a father that would rather start a new life with his "new family". Except her English cousins are a bit wild; eccentric and in touch with nature in a bizarre way that Daisy can't compute. The four cousins are Isaac, his twin brother Osbert, the adorable Piper and the unsettling Edmond.
Daisy is instantly intrigued and drawn into this world that only they exist in and soon they are left to fend for themselves as her Aunt Penn has to leave England to prevent or avert the war that is on their periphery. So, five children in the deep of the English countryside are left to look after themselves. And at first its this totally thrilling experience because HEY no adult supervision! But then the war breaks out and Daisy and Edmond find themselves fall in not-so-chaste-but-rather-really-frickin-illegal love and start to have incestuous sexytimes.
Daisy is a dry sarcastic character. watching her navigate this new world she has been thrust into made my heart ache for the kid. Her voice was snappy and quick and make me almost certain that I would find her completely hysterical. Like her first observation of Edmond:
now let me tell you what he looks like before I forget because it's not exactly what you'd expect from your average fourteen-year-old what with the CIGARETTE and hair that looks like he cut it himself with a hatchet in the dead of the night, but aside from that he's exactly like some kind of mutt, you know that ones you see at the dog shelter who are kind of hopeful and sweet and put their nose straight into your hand when they meet you with a certain kind of dignity and you know from the second that you're going to take him home? Well thats him.
I'm telling you, HYSTERICAL.
The relationships between the characters, both Daisy and Edmond and Daisy and Piper are contracted in a way that makes you believe that they are real. How even though you know Daisy and Edmond are cousins, it seems to drift away from you when you read passages when they are together. And her relationship with Piper in particular makes me want to cry just because.
Oh How I Love This Book. I can't even describe it to you in sentences that will make sense, because I promise you, I DON'T even know myself. Daisy's narrative is so easy to slip into, like one long stream of conscious thoughts rolling together right until the very end. The story is simple yet unequivocally deep and thought provoking. Her cousins are described as being otherworldly gifted: they can talk to animals, are in harmony with nature and can read peoples minds. These small little seemingly magical/supernatural aspects just ARE, they are normal and never explained and that's accepted because you are immersed so much into Daisy's world that things that she doesn't question, you yourself don't question.
And war. This unknown, inexplicable frightening war with enemies unknown. A war that is haunting and disturbing. A war that is violent and terrifying. How war can seem to children who have no understand of why such events would happen. Daisy's narrative on this front wasn't all that reliable because she never seems to feel like the war touches her even though it does. The violence of the war is never really brought to the surface until the end, but the effects are seen throughout.
And oh my gosh, can this woman write. Completely and utterly mesmerising. The lack of punctuation and only capital lets to show What Is Most Important made it a strange read but also one that I would want to re-read time and time again. It's the certainty that we live in a world that is terrible and wonderful, but human relationships are the tethers that hold us down. Sparse first person as it should be. I love this book. Compellingly beautiful.
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