Response to How I Live Now

I felt a little weird about How I Live Now right off the bat because it’s written in such a rambling style. There’s very little punctuation, and I don’t think there are any quotation marks anywhere in the book. It just quotes people without quoting them. That’s very strange to me. Whenever I see stuff like that, I wonder what the purpose is, and almost every time I eventually decide that the author is just trying to be clever. And that bothers me, to be perfectly honest. I don’t want a clever author, I want a good book. To explain a little more, the main problem I have with clever authors is that they can’t explain the decisions they make when it seems to need an explanation.
First point of the author not being able to explain her cleverness when I felt like it needed it: This war that’s going on. What is it? Who is it? When is it? I was really confused the whole time because I didn’t know what was going on. I kept hoping and waiting for the war explanation to come, and it just never did. And I understand the kids were pretty cut off from the world, and so they didn’t have a lot to go off of, but I wanted the explanation to come from Osbert, or maybe the family Daisy and Piper go to live with, the military family. See, I feel like the author wanted to create this “World War III” type feel to the book, but she didn’t want to think about how the war started, who it was between, why it was carrying on, or what it accomplished. She just cast that stuff to the side and moved on. I wanted to know what was going on, and from what I could tell I don’t think the author had a great reason for not putting that stuff in.
Second point of the author not being able to explain her cleverness when I felt like it needed it: Living in the woods. Really? This girl has been living in a big house with her English cousins for a few months and I’m supposed to believe she’s suddenly turned into Robinson Crusoe? How does she know all this stuff? She’s finding food, putting up shelter, and getting them around with a map that doesn’t tell them much. I know survival instinct can kick in, but that still doesn’t drop knowledge into your head. If I was put out in the woods in the middle of nowhere like that, I’d be dead in approximately 23 minutes. I just can’t believe that Daisy has that in her.
Third point of the author not being able to explain her cleverness when I felt like it needed it: The ending. Completely unsatisfying. She picks up the phone, and six years later she’s back in the States and the war is over. I’m sorry, what? What happened? We’re just skipping all that? Okay, I guess we’ll skip that because what happened to Edmund has to be really interesting. Is he dead? Did he get home? Oh, okay, he’s home, and he saw all those people die. But is that why he is the way he is? There’s very little explanation regarding Edmund’s state at the end of the book. Again, I feel like the author just didn’t want to think about it. It just happens too quickly for me to take it seriously.
I also have to add that I am just not okay with the cousin sex relationship aspect of this book. It happens pretty near the beginning of the book, and it threw me off right away. I know they don’t know each other so it’s like meeting someone new, but still, they are cousins, so stuff like that shouldn’t go on. And it makes me wonder again what the author’s intent is. Am I supposed to be okay with this type of relationship? Is it supposed to make me view Daisy and/or Edmund in a certain light? Is it supposed to tug at my heartstrings? Because it doesn’t, it just grosses me out. I would have been perfectly fine with a really close friendship that even bordered on love but with no sexual aspect, and I have no idea why the author decided to make that such a prominent part of the book.