Book #21, Ellie Update
This World We Live In by Susan Beth Pfeffe, book three of the The Last Survivors series I started in book #20.
That doesn't add up, does it? I read the first book of the series as book #20, and book #21 is the third book of the series. I just noticed that as I was getting URLs to link from. Luckily book #2 and #3 seem to be able to be read in any order, so I guess that works.
So. This World We Live In. It started out one month after the previous book, Life as we Knew It, ended. That's an important fact, as all the characters seemed oddly different. A big theme of the first book was that family comes first, before anyone and everyone else. You help no one else. There's no option, everyone was starving to death, to share was to die. This book opened with the mother trying to stop her daughter from "robbing" other houses (all the owners were dead or long gone, this family had been living alone for months). It made no sense. What happened to putting family first?
Suddenly all characters were fighting about stupid little things that had long since been resolved in the first book, too. It reminded me of RP where the people involved liked conflict better than anything else, so they kept resetting things back to keep the characters fighting.
Also, first person from a teenage girl's POV worked when the world was ending. It did NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT work in a book about relationships and her finding "true love" and no one else understanding it, and she's going to marry this boy after only knowing him for days and ARG. Stupid teenage relationshop crap. So painful to read. If I wanted to read about how she would throw her life away for him and he was so ~sparklingly perfect~ I'd read Twilight. (Edit: To be fair, the main character did see the boy's flaws, but they didn't matter because ~true love will find a way~.)
Seriously. The main character knows this boy for just a couple days and she has to make a choice between her whole family dying and getting an object he told her to get, and she pickled the object. It was clearly a life or death situation, a tornado racing towards the home and she stood at a literal fork in the road between the two goals.
While character flaws are great, all the characters made such stupid decisions, in a setting where one bad decision could mean death.
Blah. I loved the first book so much, I really wanted to like the second (third) one just as much, but I couldn't.
I started the third (second) book, which takes place at the same time as the first book, but it features the boyfriend from the third, which makes me all frowny. I didn't like him in the book I read, I hope this book makes me like him more...
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And an Ellie update! Because I haven't written about her in ages. Day after tomorrow will be a year and a half of her coming to live with me, and she's THIS CLOSE to being a normal cat. :D She has Opinions on things, and some things she has great dislike for, but she shows very little fear anymore.
She went from not wanting to be touched and sure as heck not wanting to be picked up, to being so demanding about being picked up that half the time I have to hold her while I exercise in the morning.
She has one dislike-bordering-on-fear left, and that's her feet/cutting her claws. When I stopped cutting Dax's, they grew in a circle and cut back into the paw pad, so I want to try to keep them trimmed. Plus Ellie is a ... pawsy? cat, she reaches for my hand to bring it to her, tries to hold it when she wants more pats, paws at my legs and feet to try to get me to stop, all that. We're working on cutting them. Slowly. I get one or two claws cut a day, when she's really relaxed. By the time I get them all cut, it's time to do the first ones again. :P
She has a couple fears/dislikes left that I don't understand. She has no fear of me left, no fear even of my feet when I'm walking (sad she lost that one!), but she has this insane fear of me when I'm horizontal. If I lay down in bed, she goes running. If I sit on the sofa with my feet up and legs straight, she won't come near me. I don't understand where this comes from. Do humans look bigger when flat? I wouldn't think so. Did she get rolled over on by someone as a kitten?
There are small bits of her personality that I feel bad about. If I walk near her food bowls (or even in her general direction) while she's eating, she goes running so fast she loses moist bits of food out of her mouth. I'm kind of glad I don't have a second cat, since I suspect they might bully her away from her food.
I wish I knew what her life was like before me. But whatever it was, I'm happy for her now. She must be happier, not being scared all the time. Being able to accept (and seek out!) pats. Endless pats. She'd have me pat and scratch her for hours if I had nothing better to do with my hands.
I wish she'd sleep with me at night, but the whole scary-while-flat thing. Maybe one day that will go away, too. (Has anyone heard of that before? Is it a common cat fear? I've not run into it previously...)
That doesn't add up, does it? I read the first book of the series as book #20, and book #21 is the third book of the series. I just noticed that as I was getting URLs to link from. Luckily book #2 and #3 seem to be able to be read in any order, so I guess that works.
So. This World We Live In. It started out one month after the previous book, Life as we Knew It, ended. That's an important fact, as all the characters seemed oddly different. A big theme of the first book was that family comes first, before anyone and everyone else. You help no one else. There's no option, everyone was starving to death, to share was to die. This book opened with the mother trying to stop her daughter from "robbing" other houses (all the owners were dead or long gone, this family had been living alone for months). It made no sense. What happened to putting family first?
Suddenly all characters were fighting about stupid little things that had long since been resolved in the first book, too. It reminded me of RP where the people involved liked conflict better than anything else, so they kept resetting things back to keep the characters fighting.
Also, first person from a teenage girl's POV worked when the world was ending. It did NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT work in a book about relationships and her finding "true love" and no one else understanding it, and she's going to marry this boy after only knowing him for days and ARG. Stupid teenage relationshop crap. So painful to read. If I wanted to read about how she would throw her life away for him and he was so ~sparklingly perfect~ I'd read Twilight. (Edit: To be fair, the main character did see the boy's flaws, but they didn't matter because ~true love will find a way~.)
Seriously. The main character knows this boy for just a couple days and she has to make a choice between her whole family dying and getting an object he told her to get, and she pickled the object. It was clearly a life or death situation, a tornado racing towards the home and she stood at a literal fork in the road between the two goals.
While character flaws are great, all the characters made such stupid decisions, in a setting where one bad decision could mean death.
Blah. I loved the first book so much, I really wanted to like the second (third) one just as much, but I couldn't.
I started the third (second) book, which takes place at the same time as the first book, but it features the boyfriend from the third, which makes me all frowny. I didn't like him in the book I read, I hope this book makes me like him more...
---
And an Ellie update! Because I haven't written about her in ages. Day after tomorrow will be a year and a half of her coming to live with me, and she's THIS CLOSE to being a normal cat. :D She has Opinions on things, and some things she has great dislike for, but she shows very little fear anymore.
She went from not wanting to be touched and sure as heck not wanting to be picked up, to being so demanding about being picked up that half the time I have to hold her while I exercise in the morning.
She has one dislike-bordering-on-fear left, and that's her feet/cutting her claws. When I stopped cutting Dax's, they grew in a circle and cut back into the paw pad, so I want to try to keep them trimmed. Plus Ellie is a ... pawsy? cat, she reaches for my hand to bring it to her, tries to hold it when she wants more pats, paws at my legs and feet to try to get me to stop, all that. We're working on cutting them. Slowly. I get one or two claws cut a day, when she's really relaxed. By the time I get them all cut, it's time to do the first ones again. :P
She has a couple fears/dislikes left that I don't understand. She has no fear of me left, no fear even of my feet when I'm walking (sad she lost that one!), but she has this insane fear of me when I'm horizontal. If I lay down in bed, she goes running. If I sit on the sofa with my feet up and legs straight, she won't come near me. I don't understand where this comes from. Do humans look bigger when flat? I wouldn't think so. Did she get rolled over on by someone as a kitten?
There are small bits of her personality that I feel bad about. If I walk near her food bowls (or even in her general direction) while she's eating, she goes running so fast she loses moist bits of food out of her mouth. I'm kind of glad I don't have a second cat, since I suspect they might bully her away from her food.
I wish I knew what her life was like before me. But whatever it was, I'm happy for her now. She must be happier, not being scared all the time. Being able to accept (and seek out!) pats. Endless pats. She'd have me pat and scratch her for hours if I had nothing better to do with my hands.
I wish she'd sleep with me at night, but the whole scary-while-flat thing. Maybe one day that will go away, too. (Has anyone heard of that before? Is it a common cat fear? I've not run into it previously...)