Peggy Hillcoat is the daughter of a famous German concert pianist and an English survivalist, who despite the disapproval of his wife keeps stockpiling supplies in a shelter in their garden and preparing for the worst. Only eight years old, she doesn’t question what is happening when her father takes her away from their big house in London while her mother is away on tour. He takes her to the German countryside, to a delapitated cabin remote in the mountains, explaining that this is their home now and that there’s been a terrible disaster, they are the only ones left in the entire world.
Peggy is distraught that she’ll never get to see her mother or her school friends again, but soon settles into her new reality, helping her father as best she can to get the cabin livable and gathering the supplies that they need to survive. The book begins in 1985, nine years later, when Peggy has been returned to her mother and is trying to adapt to a very different life once more. Little by little the readers discover the reasons her father took her away in the first place, and the details of the years she spent in the lonely wilderness with only the woods and her imagination for entertainment.
Because the book begins in 1985, after Peggy is returned to her mother, the reader is never in doubt that she will survive, even when the story gets really tense and dramatic.
The rest of my review can be found here. I am not the first Cannonballer to review this. You can read other (very complimentary reviews) from SavageCat, janniethestrange, Fiat.Luxury, badkittyuno and Sophia.
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