Hitting Close to Home

I like the way Susan Beth Pfeffer's Life as We Knew It opens. Miranda is supposed to watch an an asteroid hit the moon and write a report on it for school, becasue even the adults don't know that things on Earth are about to go horribly wrong. It's like when the Titanic is about to go down, and there's prople out on the deck playing hockey with the ice cubes. Or when the Great Storm hit Galveston in 1900 and tons of people went out to play in the waves. Creepy stuff.

Because in Miranda's world, that rock striking the moon brings on a series of catastrophies that make a measley little hurricane look like a kid splashing around in a bathtub. Suddenly prom and swim meets aren't the most important things in Miranda's life. She's more concerned with finding food and not freezing to death.

There are a few minor details in the novel that don't ring true. Threatened with starvation, a lot of people would have eaten the cat, right up near the front of the book. I'm a cat person, so I would like to think I wouldn't have. But I certainly would have eaten the cat's food! Overall, though, this is a really good book, and Miranda is an awesome protagonist. Life as We Knew It ends leaving the reader wanting to know more about Miranda's world.

And Pfeffer certainly delivers. The Dead and the Gone examines the same series of events from a different point of view. Alex's parents disappear, leaving him to traverse the bold new world which used to be New York with only his two younger sisters. It's pretty harrowing, but if you read that one and still haven't had enough, the third book, This World We Live In will be released in January 2010. It's supposed to take place a month after the first book and will be a return to Miranda's point of view.

In the meantime, Pfeffer has an offer on her blog where you can get a bookplate that she's signed to put into the front of your copies of the first two books.