Pfeffer, Susan Beth: Life As We Knew It
Life As We Knew It
Writer: Susan Beth Pfeffer
Genre: YA/Science Fiction
Pages: 337
It was a total accident that I discovered this book. In fact, if not for Pfeffer's sequel, The Dead and the Gone, I don't think I would've EVER found this sucker. I'm always on the look-out for YA SF (yes, I know about Scott Westerfeld, and no, I haven't read him yet), and when I saw this fit the bill AND it was a woman writer, well, I just had to have it.
The premise: a meteor hits the moon and knocks its orbit closer to Earth. This makes everything go to hell: tidal waves, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes. It feels like the world is ending, and it just might be. Miranda and her family do whatever it takes to survive the coming days. The book's almost The Road for teen readers, only this book isn't about a journey through nuclear winter, it's about the struggle to stay home, the struggle to take care of the people you love.
Spoilers ahead.
The book's written from the first-person POV of Miranda, via her diary. We see the world as we know it, idiot president and all. We see the dramatic event of the moon getting struck and coming closer. And then, of course, the aftermath.
There's something beautiful and haunting about this particular story. For starters, the world is thrown into chaos by a completely natural event. At first, I questioned whether or not anything could've been done to prevent it, but considering the world in Pfeffer's book is pretty much parallel to our own, I don't think there could've been. Especially with an idiot president.
Not my words, by the way, but I had to snicker every time the mother made that remark about the president, who is never named, but whose speeches are a dead-ringer for the current administration. Oh, and he's from Texas.
President aside: I liked seeing how a singular family handled this tragedy, but also, how the friends of this family handled it as well. Miranda had two best friends, both of who are kind of estranged before the tragedy. One because she's a little TOO familiar with boys, and the other for turning UBER-religious.
And I have to say, I liked how Pfeffer handled those fates: Sammi, the boy-crazy one, ends up getting foisted off on a forty-year-old man who's in love with her and has the means to take care of her (means meaning gas, food, and water), and what's frightening is how willing her parents are to let it happen. Megan, the uber-religious one, ends up holding on to her faith until the very end, believing her prayers will sustain her, but there's one moment we get to see her as truly human, and that makes Megan's wasting away all the more tragic, especially when Miranda meets her pastor to find out what happened to Megan and her mother (Megan finally died, her mother hung herself afterwards, and the church wouldn't bury the mother next to the daughter because the mom committed suicide, and OH YEAH: the pastor hasn't lost a bit of weight because his congregation has been kind enough to offer HIM food while they starve, and of course, he's gracious enough to accept).
But the story is about Miranda: what it means to be a teenager, especially a teenager in a rapidly changing world. She's such a teenager, but she's so human. The arguments she and her mother get into I found to be very believable, and the family dynamic was powerful, though--and I think this is just me, not having a very strong family dynamic--I had trouble accepting that anyone would make a conscious decision of who would most likely survive out of the family and make sure that person stayed slightly better fed than everyone else. How can you make that decision as a parent of three children? It's something Miranda struggles with, thinking her mother loves her brother Jon better, but over the course of the book, we learn that really isn't the case: he just has the best chance of survival if it all goes to hell. Well, more than it has.
Despite my slight resistance to the idea of picking one kid out of the family to feed better, I found Miranda's willingness to sacrifice herself very believable and touching. After taking care of her entire family once they come down with the flu (a very bad one), she realizes she doesn't want to be around to see her mom die, who's likely to kick the bucket first, so she goes to town to let the cold kill her. Only, help has arrived, after a fashion, and finally, food's starting to come in.
It's a really, really good story. We see the narrator struggle and grow, and the aftermath of the moon coming closer was actually pretty interesting. I kept asking myself why certain things would happen: why's the weather getting bad? What's up with the electricity? But as I read, I realized that yes, the moon coming closer would effect more than just the tides, and reading about the east coast getting wiped out was chilling. Good details, and solid character to relate to, and that's a good thing.
My Rating
Must Have: all and all, I loved this book. It's optimistic while realistic, and it doesn't have to get completely depressing in order to gain that realism. I did question whether or not the level of violence seen/heard about was realistic in this situation (we saw very little, and there's always something to be said about men with guns, as Cormac McCarthy's The Road taught us), but overall, I appreciated Pfeffer's view. Yes, there's great tragedy and yes, everything grinds to a halt, but life itself goes on. The book's about doing whatever is necessary to make it so. It's poignant and haunting, and absolutely worth the read whether you're a YA reader or not. And yes, I'll be reading the sequel.
Next up:
Book: Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin
Graphic Novel: V for Vendetta by Alan Moore