onemuseleft (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
onemuseleft) wrote2006-09-12 04:33 pm
onemuseleft) wrote2006-09-12 04:33 pm
(no subject)
Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer turned out to be surprisingly good. It's first-person, diary format, which is two strikes against it from the beginning, but the premise was enough to make me pick it up anyway. It's survival fiction, which I have a guilty fondness for - Hatchet, and My Side of the Mountain were favorites of mine long before I discovered zombies, The Big One and The Day After Tomorrow.
The book starts with Miranda, who is 16. There's some sort of big thing happening with the moon - Miranda doesn't watch the news, so she doesn't really know what - and she's annoyed because it means all her teachers are assigning extra work. It turns out that what's happening is that an asteroid is set to strike the moon, and that if the skies are clear, people should be able to see it happening. But don't worry, the astronomers on the news add, we're in no danger.
So you can totally guess what happens, right?
The collision throws the moon into a closer orbit, causing tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions. We see everything from Miranda's point of view, which is limitted. For a while she gets so worked up that she stops listening to the news because she wants to pretend that things aren't getting any worse.
One of the things I really enjoyed about this book, aside from the obvious death and destruction, was the way the character grew up as things went on. The world didn't end, but it might as well have. There's no school, there are no police, if the government is still out there, no one in rural Pennsylvania knows about it. No food, no gas - and with winter coming, no heat. Miranda acts like a teenager, even as she starts skipping meals to give her younger brother a better chance at living.
All four main characters are very engaging, from Matt, the protective big brother, to Jonny, who is such an oblivious brat that you just want to smack him a couple of times. The mother is trying to do what she has to without letting them know exactly how bad things have gotten - and somewhere in the distance is their dad and his new wife, who are hundreds of miles away but very much in the top of Miranda's thoughts.
The one thing that kind of threw me out of the book was just one line where Miranda comments on how her mother is happier not knowing "things." This really didn't fit in with the image of Laura-the-wonder-Mom that we've been getting throughout the book, a woman who listens to the news so she can try and prepare, a woman who journeys four miles without a car to check the mail to see if she can get word of her ex-husband, a woman who read the lists of the dead to see if her friends in New York made it. It's only one line, but it really seemed like it didn't belong.
Anyway, it's worth a read if you like that sort of thing. ^_^
The book starts with Miranda, who is 16. There's some sort of big thing happening with the moon - Miranda doesn't watch the news, so she doesn't really know what - and she's annoyed because it means all her teachers are assigning extra work. It turns out that what's happening is that an asteroid is set to strike the moon, and that if the skies are clear, people should be able to see it happening. But don't worry, the astronomers on the news add, we're in no danger.
So you can totally guess what happens, right?
The collision throws the moon into a closer orbit, causing tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions. We see everything from Miranda's point of view, which is limitted. For a while she gets so worked up that she stops listening to the news because she wants to pretend that things aren't getting any worse.
One of the things I really enjoyed about this book, aside from the obvious death and destruction, was the way the character grew up as things went on. The world didn't end, but it might as well have. There's no school, there are no police, if the government is still out there, no one in rural Pennsylvania knows about it. No food, no gas - and with winter coming, no heat. Miranda acts like a teenager, even as she starts skipping meals to give her younger brother a better chance at living.
All four main characters are very engaging, from Matt, the protective big brother, to Jonny, who is such an oblivious brat that you just want to smack him a couple of times. The mother is trying to do what she has to without letting them know exactly how bad things have gotten - and somewhere in the distance is their dad and his new wife, who are hundreds of miles away but very much in the top of Miranda's thoughts.
The one thing that kind of threw me out of the book was just one line where Miranda comments on how her mother is happier not knowing "things." This really didn't fit in with the image of Laura-the-wonder-Mom that we've been getting throughout the book, a woman who listens to the news so she can try and prepare, a woman who journeys four miles without a car to check the mail to see if she can get word of her ex-husband, a woman who read the lists of the dead to see if her friends in New York made it. It's only one line, but it really seemed like it didn't belong.
Anyway, it's worth a read if you like that sort of thing. ^_^