Have you heard about the YA book where the main character is banging her cousin? Whether your answer is yes or no, get ready to get acquainted with Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now, in which yes, the main character is banging her cousin.

Whether this scandal piques your interest or makes you want to wash your eyeballs in hopes of unseeing that first paragraph we wrote, consider this: Since its publication in 2004, this book has lassoed all kinds of critical acclaim and accolades. We're talking the Bradford Boase Award for outstanding novel for children or young adults by a first-time novelist, the Michael L. Printz Award for the best book of the year written for teens, and the once-in-a-lifetime Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.

How I Live Now also managed to make the short list for the LA Times Book Prize, the Whitbread Children's Book Award, and the Orange First Novel Prize. It's basically the Meryl Streep of YA books—so while cousins do get down and dirty with each other, rest assured that this isn't smut, but smut with a purpose. And here's the thing: The much-talked-about incest of How I Live Now is really tangential to the story of family and survival in a futuristic world war.

In other words, whether you're trying to read every major award-winner ever written, secretly harbor a crush on your cousin, or geek out about war and/or the future, then there's something in How I Live Now for you. Plus, it's been made into a movie—and you have to read the book before you see it. It's just the right way to do things.

Have you ever daydreamed about what it might be like if your parents were stuck somewhere for an extended period of time and you got to live on your own with your besties and just do whatever you wanted all day? Or what it might be like to get the heck out of dodge and flee to an exotic and beautiful location where you fall in love with a mysterious guy who's so totally into you, too?

Well, How I Live Now explores exactly this parent-free, best-friend-filled scenario. Our main girl, Daisy, gets sent away to England by her evil stepmother, and her new guardian aunt gets stuck in Norway on business, so it's all sunshine and frolicking and playtime and romance for Daisy and her English cousins… until World War III literally enters their backyard. Suddenly that whole no-grown-ups-around thing seems a little more harrowing, doesn’t it?

Like most of us growing up in modern-day America, Daisy sees war as a faraway problem that happens in faraway places, where people she doesn't really know fight about vague issues she doesn't totally understand. It's not until the war threatens her own well-being and separates her from those she cares about most that she truly understands all the ways in which it destroys lives.

As much as How I Live Now gives us a taste of the carefree fun of free-range teens, it also offers a glimpse into what it might be like for those not lucky enough to grow up in safe places far away from war and conflict. But rather than being a total downer, it presents an important message of hope and shows us how we might not even realize our own strength until it's really needed.