Life As We Knew it, by Susan Beth Pfeffer (spoilers!)
Welcome to the first actual discussion post of a book! I've been thinking about how to approach the discussion, and have followed a lot of the buzz about it on various blogs (and trust me, there's a whole hell of a lot). I'm still not sure how to lead off, though! Maybe structure is not a good thing in this case. I mean, we're not like, a book club or anything.
owlmoose made the comments early on that any book where her city is wiped out in the very beginning is kind of disconcerting. I thought that would be an interesting question to ask, since it didn't actually occur to me much until the end of the book. I live in the central south, but then again, I live on the wrong side of the river, as the author has been saying on her blog (her posts are hilarious, but warning, she includes a lot of spoilers about the dead & the gone and possible future books in the series). So I don't actually know whether I would be better off than somewhere with less chances for a rough winter (although that makes me wonder about how much worse the winters would be).
If this disaster happened, what do you think would happen to where you live? What would you do? Assume survival for yourself. ;)
So my general questions that I want to toss out, since I can't really find any good discussion questions that aren't written by textbook writers assuming kids are stupid:
1. How did you perceive the ending? I got an Anne-Frank feel from it, as if the happy-ending was a omen. Survival, but at high cost of a later event that would make them think the winter was a walk in the park. Because Pfeffer doesn't seem the type of writer to back down from the horror, and her ending was fairly pat. I know all about deus ex machina complexes, guys! I mean, what are the chances? Why would Pfeffer deliberately make that choice? Is it just because it's YA or is it because in her head canon things get even worse after this small reprieve, all the more bitter-making? Thoughts?
2. What do you make of the mother basically asking Miranda to committ suicide, especially in light of Megan and her food/religion?
3. Did the religion bits of this creep you out as much as me? BECAUSE SERIOUSLY, they creeped me out more than the moony bits. A lot of reviews judge the book really harshly on this point, going so far as to call it anti-religion. These are the reviewers that also get kind of butthurt about the prods at G.W. Bush, though, so maybe it makes sense? I mean, HOW DARE Pfeffer write a liberal character with liberal biases. Yeah, she really sucks at characterization!
(Also I found a review that was pretty hilariously calling the book badly written because of Miranda's mother, being upset that she didn't help her neighbors and hoarded everything. I must've dreamed that part where she helped her neighbor and where Pfeffer went through a lot of layering to make it clear that she was desperate to save her kids. But screw them! She should be sharing everything with everyone else. alsfkdjsdfff\
One day I will learn to stay away from Amazon reviews. It's like a really bad car wreck, I'm sorry.)
4. How reliable a narrator do you think Miranda is? Consider the scene on the pond where she runs into her skating idol. Is this real? Is it not? I am not sure what I think, but this was at a point in the novel where the entire family is stressed and hunger. The hunger is always there but so subtle (I actually think Pfeffer did a good job at this) that I only had doubts about the scene when Miranda decided to keep it to herself. I'm also thrown by Miranda herself wonder about the likelihood.
5. Parents giving their kids away (FORTY YEAR OLD MAN) so they can survive. s.dkfj;sdfff
6. Which death bothered you the most?
I liked this book a lot, which is surprising because I wasn't too fond of diary-style work before I picked it up. I thought Miranda was just spot-on in her voice, and boy, does the fact that I get a foreboding feeling from the end for her make me feel bad. Please let her live!
The companion novel to Life As We Knew It comes out in the U.S. in June, titled, the dead & the gone (or you can cheat like I did via my U.K. crack book dealer, not_cynical.
Feel free to throw your own questions out so everyone else can answer them!