Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Synopsis:
It's almost the end of Miranda's sophomore year in high school, and her journal reflects the busy life of a typical teenager: conversations with friends, fights with mom, and fervent hopes for a driver's license. When Miranda first begins hearing the reports of a meteor on a collision course with the moon, it hardly seems worth a mention in her diary. But after the meteor hits, pushing the moon off its axis and causing worldwide earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes, all the things Miranda used to take for granted begin to disappear. Food and gas shortages, along with extreme weather changes, come to her small Pennsylvania town; and Miranda's voice is by turns petulant, angry, and finally resigned, as her family is forced to make tough choices while they consider their increasingly limited options. Yet even as suspicious neighbors stockpile food in anticipation of a looming winter without heat or electricity, Miranda knows that that her future is still hers to decide even if life as she knew it is over.

My Rating: 7/10

My Thoughts:
Nothing happens in this book, yet I couldn't put it down. Ok, not "nothing happens"... but after the initial cataclysmic event, not a lot happens. Basically it's an account of every day life of a family dealing with the apocalypse. Accounts of lack of food, electricity, water and the slow sacrifice of everything that exists in modern life fill the pages, and I was riveted.

It was interesting to read about society trying to keep school going as long as possible. It was a very hopeful gesture for a society that did not know if life was ever going to return to normal and if knowing tenth grade history would ever be needed. I would have thought in a society struggling for survival, school would have been the first thing to go. Yet they kept it going as long as possible keeping normalcy as an anchor in a world no one recognizes any more.

I also liked the part where she meets her ice skater hero one day at the pond, then they part never to meet again. Miranda herself questions if that really happened or if was merely a hallucination of a starving girl. And the question is never answered.

I only gave this book a 7, even though I really did like it, because though it was interesting there wasn't a lot that would make me want to go back and reread it. The books that I give an 8 or higher to are ones I would gladly go back and reread. They have something about them that continues to draw me even after I've finished it. This book just didn't quite have that.

There are not a lot of characters in the book, and I wouldn't recommend it for everyone, but lovers of post-apocalyptic fiction should check it out.

There is a second book in the series which follows a boy in New York city. I'm not sure I'm interested in that one, but the third one comes out soon and it continues Miranda's story. That one I can't wait for.