When Daisy reaches eighteen, she enters a highly selective club. In this club, you get a test that decides if you live or die.

To the casual observer Daisy is a vile bully with a drug habit. She’s been expelled from school and frightens her family. Realising the disease that devoured her father is after her, Daisy has given up.

Her one remaining cheerleader is her Uncle Ben. He’s trying hard to fulfil the promise he made to her father, but has big problems of his own.

Light emerges when Daisy is forced to work in a care home. Much to everyone’s delight, she’s shockingly successful. Just as she turns a corner, long hidden family secrets crawl from under the carpet. When Daisy stumbles upon the ugly truth, relationships crumble to an all-time low. Can Ben or her overbearing gran contain this volcanic teenager before she blows everyone’s future out of the water?

Surviving Him is a coming of age, psychological suspense informed by Jo Johnson’s work as a clinical psychologist. The story explores the aftermath of frontal temporal dementia for three generations of one extended family.

My Review

When I started reading this book I found it a bit vague and convoluted, and myself and my fellow Pigeons (my online book club), got a bit frustrated. We had no idea what was going on. However, by the end I was blubbing like a lovesick teenager, which is something I rarely do when reading. So on that basis alone I have give it 4.5/5 stars. I only just remembered that I read Surviving Her with The Pigeonhole and gave that 5 stars as well.

The story is focused around 17-year-old Daisy. She’s a ‘typical’ teenager but in the extreme – a stroppy, gothy emo who self-harms and shouts and swears, nicks things, and hangs around with the wrong crowd. But her reasons are very different from most teens. Her dad Owen was diagnosed with FTD (frontotemporal dementia), for which there is no cure and life expectancy is six to eight years but can be far less. In his worst moments he broke things, lost his temper and finally hit Daisy, which was the beginning of the end.

Daisy is smart and creative, but her world has been rocked and she can’t cope. FTD is genetic and everyone wants her to take a test when she turns 18 to find out if she will be affected. It’s too much for Daisy.

Finally she is expelled from school (great move by the school – write her off at 17), and doesn’t know where to turn. Then her controlling gran Dorothy (I had a lot of sympathy for her) gets her a job in The Orchards nursing home and she starts to flourish. In fact some of the residents will only respond to her straightforward attitude.

The trouble with Daisy’s family is that everyone is keeping secrets, and often they don’t behave in a way that I consider to be ‘normal’, but then I’m not a psychologist. Her mum Estelle has turned to drink and fallen out with Daisy, uncle Ben is a bit of a twat really, his wife Callie is OK, but she doesn’t know the truth (I would have told my husband everything), while Dorothy tries to hold it all together by perpetuating the lies. Then Daisy meets Sachini and her son Haizeh in the park and everything changes.

I loved this book – there is so much warmth and hope amongst the despair.

Many thanks to The Pigeonhole, the author and my fellow Pigeons for making this such an enjoyable read. 

About the Author

Jo qualified as a clinical psychologist in 1992 specialising in neurology since 2000. She worked for fifteen years within the NHS but in 2008 made an impulsive decision to leave in order to write and explore new projects.

She continue to practise psychology hoping one day to become perfect at it! In her spare time she loves writing fiction and given her day job she believes she can write characters who could be real.