This World We Live In, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

The third and last of Pfeffer's Last Survivors series, this book brought together Miranda from Life As We Knew It and Alex from The Dead and The Gone, in Miranda's ruined suburbs. Alex, still protecting his little sister Julie, is a much more likable character in this book, and his insistance on getting Julie to a convent makes more sense in this book than in the last. Still, neither of the sequels came close to the fantastic horror of the first, making me wish rather that Pfeffer had left Life As We Knew It as a stand-alone novel.

The Dead and the Gone, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Eck. NOWHERE near as good as the first one, Life As We Knew It. In fact, this was so bad, I wondered if the first was actually that good.

MAJOR dissapointment here for me. This was pretty awful.

And damn, is she just going to write the same story over and over from different points of view? Because while that may be interesting in theory, this really didn't cut it for me.

Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

A little light reading!

No, this was fantastic- and anxiety-feeding! At first, 16 year old Miranda's diary entries hardly mention the collision. Sure, astronomers are warning that a comet will hit the moon, and some are saying that it could bring severe disruptions to life on earth, but most people aren't panicking.

The collision knocks the moon off its orbit, causing horrible tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanos, etc. on Earth. Now, I love a natural disaster movie, so this scenario was right up my alley, but the way Pfeiffer turned a huge-scale end-of -the-world story into a tight, claustrophobic, hopeful family story was amazing. That's a good trick, right there.

Very well written, plausible, realistic, and somehow elegiacal and offering hope all at once, this was a solid, good book.

Life as we knew it

Quality: 9 Popularity: 7 Overall: 16