Susan Beth Pfeffer (1948–2025)

The reason I am giving this my highest rating is because I was fully invested in this book. I felt panic, dread, hopelessness; I smiled and became teary-eyed at the end. I was completely and totally IN this book, and that doesn't happen very often.

Miranda is 16 and has the usual teen angst that every girl does, but it wasn't off-putting, over done, and I didn't want to slap sense into her once. Matt was an excellent older brother character. I will admit that I wanted to slap the fire out of show more Jon sometimes, but he is probably a normal, self-absorbed 13-year-old boy.

Miranda's friends are very real people, too. One is a little loose with the boys and one is overly religious, which is just two sides to a coin that claims many teenagers.

The adult characters act like, surprise!, adults. They think of their children first, make hard decisions and sacrifices and still try to maintain some semblance of normalcy in extraordinary circumstances.

Bottom line: this may not be the stuff of science fiction, but a glimpse into our future. Nature and the universe hold together very carefully and specifically, and we all too often take for granted its constant presence. This book proved to be so intense for me that I will have to read a few in between before going to the next one in the series. But I will definitely read the others.

Highly recommended. show less

This book goes from zero to hell in only a few pages, and it gave me nightmares. It pushed every end-of-the-world anxiety button that I have: starvation, societal collapse, us-against-them, cults, the postapocalyptic role of women. It's a smart book, vicious with its characters, and it hits where it hurts. I devoured it in one sitting, afraid to keep reading but too compelled to stop. I ached to see the POV character go from a privileged teenager to a survivor. As a writer I found the ending show more kind of weak, a soft throw after pages of hardball, but as a reader I wanted it to end well. I wanted things to be okay for these characters, even if salvation came from the outside and felt a little like a cheat. show less

The Short of It:

After reading just a few pages, you won’t be able to put this one down. It’s scary at times but hopeful too.

The Rest of It:

I have read a lot of books about the end of the world. I’m not a morbid person but deep, deep down I do believe that something horrible could happen to the world as we know it. Fires, earthquakes, tsunamis (oh my!)…I had to toss that in there to lighten it up a bit. Anyway, with the weird weather patterns and the fear of a pandemic, Life As We show more Knew It is not all that farfetched. Really.

After the moon’s position is compromised by a meteor hit, Miranda and her family do their best to survive in a world that is completely different from what they’re used to. There are lots of things that I liked about this novel so I thought I’d stray from my usual format and make a list:

Miranda, at age 16, is very much a sixteen-year-old but emotionally strong when she needs to be.
Miranda’s mom is a sensible woman. I’ve read so many of these types of books where the mom is just the stereotypical “mom” and lacks any kind of common sense. Not the case here.
The family works together as a unit and it’s believable.
The other characters are actually important to the story and not just there to create conflict.
Pfeffer paints a realistic picture of what could happen given such a catastrophe. These characters are hungry and you feel it. As Miranda longs for a hot shower, you are reminded of how wonderful hot water can be. I mentioned above that it’s scary at times, scary as in “This could happen!”
Even though the subject matter is grim, there is a strong sense of hope throughout the story. This is incredibly hard to do but Pfeffer does it effortlessly.
Since this is a young adult book, I could easily see a teenager reading this and really thinking about how good they have it. As an adult, I know I spent many moments pondering what was on the page.
I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I expected it to be a page-turner, but I didn’t expect to care about the characters as much as I did and I didn’t expect to think about it days after reading it. show less

When an asteroid is going to hit the moon, nobody took much notice because it wasn't supposed to do much - but, in fact, the asteroid was dense and knocked the moon off course, bringing it closer to earth. Within hours, the tides are wreaking havoc with tsunamis across the world, the electricity is starting to fail, and Miranda and her family find themselves in survival mode.

My reading tends more to the fantasy and teen dystopia side of science fiction, so this post-apocalyptic tale was a show more different sort of read for me and reminded me a bit of Alas, Babylon. Except, instead of a nuclear war that might have been preventable, we see the aftermath of a natural event that was absolutely no one's fault. I would have to read up on the science behind it, but I couldn't help but wonder if the fallout of one thing after another was an accurate "what could be" or a perfect storm of terrible events that have almost no chance of happening. While I liked Miranda for the most part and enjoyed her growth as she's forced to do things she never would have thought herself capable of, I questioned whether her family's complete isolation was necessary or even beneficial. In a way, the book raised more questions for me than it answered and it's hard to call such a bleak tale enjoyable, though there is some hope throughout, since it was such difficult reading. I'm not sorry I read it, but would only guardedly recommend it. show less