Elizabeth (known as ‘Daisy’) is a teenager from Manhattan shipped off to her English country cousins in advance of the birth of her “evil” stepmother’s first child. She is cynical, world-weary, anorexic, and angry. And you might think she is about as marginalized and isolated as a young person can be. Until war breaks out in various countries including Britain and America and Daisy becomes even more cut off. Existentially cut off. Except that by then she has already bonded with her cousins who have become the family she never knew she missed. Indeed the bonds are so immediate and visceral that they seem to be able to share each other’s thoughts.
Meg Rosoff has created a thoroughly believable voice in her first-person narrator, Daisy. I loved her New York sensibility and her observations (never overdone) of some of the differences between life in America and life in England. Daisy journeys through an emotional as well as a physical landscape as she moves from cynicism to friendship to love, fear, desperation, horror and more. It is a fast-moving spectacle and all the reader can do is hold on with both hands. Recommended.