Reviews with content warning for Medical content - Life As We Knew It

This is a good read - pretty easy, but still covers a lot of information and goes into into development on the story without sacrificing ease of understanding the plot and where it's going. Susan Beth Pfeffer does a good job setting up the series with this book, but it could just as easily be a standalone if you don't want to read the rest of it (though I suggest continuing). Our narrator drives me crazy - Miranda Evans is supposed to feel like your average teenage girl living through what people would probably call the apocalypse (the moon moving closer to earth - for more details, read the book!), but I just find her kind of whiny. Like, I get she's going through a lot and has a lot to process as a young girl going through all of this, but there's a tone taken throughout the book that makes it somewhat difficult to sympathize with her, even though it's written in first person. This was especially surprising with the diary format, but it still holds, regardless. Nonetheless, disliking the narrator/MC doesn't mean I dislike the book, and that was definitely the case for this.

Spoilers:
Low-level spoiler:

Reading back through this, I am realizing that Miranda's mom probably had a great idea of what to get, and I do think reading this again after the pandemic has given me a much better idea of how people would actually react if they were to go through something like this.

Low-level spoiler:

The first time I read this through a couple years ago, I didn't think twice about the surgical masks comment. However, given what we've gone through recently, I genuinely thought this was kind of funny. Obviously, this was not intentional on the part of the author, but I doubt anyone in the future going through something like what happens in this book would actually find the surgical masks "weird," just based on the pandemic and how everyone was wearing them.

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