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bonnybonnybooks 's review for:
Life As We Knew It
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
This is life during the apocalypse. Not a long-distant after where somehow things have gone bad and the characters are living in the aftermath of some (usually unexplained) disaster. No, this is the world falling apart throughout the book. And it’s not zombies and it’s not nuclear warfare. It’s an asteroid that hits the moon with enough force that it knocks it closer. And apparently that fucks things up right good. Tides get fiercer, wiping out—as far as I could tell—all coasts. Earthquakes destroy more things. And then volcanoes start going off all over the world, creating a new Ice Age. Not something anyone would want to live through.
Miranda (is that a [b:The Tempest|12985|The Tempest|William Shakespeare|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327793692s/12985.jpg|1359590] reference?) starts out as a typical annoying teenager but realistically evolves over the course of the story into a hardened survivor who will do what is necessary for those she loves.
Miranda has a problem with making friends. Even before the world collapses, her two best friends have gone into tailspins from the death of another friend. One turns to sex to escape (after the apocalypse, she attaches herself to a much older man for survival and leaves town with him) and the other turns to religion (after the apocalypse, she starves herself to death as some bizarre act of piety). They are just two vehicles to show different reactions to the End Times, not so much characters. Miranda doesn’t really get any other friends. She briefly gets a boyfriend, but then they don’t talk for weeks (and she never considers trying to go see him) before he leaves town. She runs into her long-time skating idol and then convinces herself he was a figment of her imagination and never tries to meet up with him again. She complains about feeling isolated, but makes no effort to see people. I understand the whole Swiss Family Robinson self-reliance thing the family had going, but I think it’s truly bizarre Pfeffer decided to essentially completely isolate them from the town. The reason people survived in hard situations in times gone by is through an intense sense of community. You NEED the other people around you to survive. It’s very hard to do it by yourself. That’s why exile/banishment was so bad.
For the most part, Pfeffer avoids the images of violence of the apocalypse by just keeping the family in their house. That’s a little refreshing, but also a little frustrating. I WISH I knew more what was going on in the other parts of the world, even in the town itself. What the hell happened to everyone else?
The situation was very compelling—what would you do if the world as you knew it violently ended, and you were left with only yourself and your family? But there were flaws. The characters were fairly thin. The ending seemed like a deux ex machina. The self-imposed isolation by the family was frustrating. Still, an interesting take on the end of Life As We Know It.
Miranda (is that a [b:The Tempest|12985|The Tempest|William Shakespeare|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327793692s/12985.jpg|1359590] reference?) starts out as a typical annoying teenager but realistically evolves over the course of the story into a hardened survivor who will do what is necessary for those she loves.
Miranda has a problem with making friends. Even before the world collapses, her two best friends have gone into tailspins from the death of another friend. One turns to sex to escape (after the apocalypse, she attaches herself to a much older man for survival and leaves town with him) and the other turns to religion (after the apocalypse, she starves herself to death as some bizarre act of piety). They are just two vehicles to show different reactions to the End Times, not so much characters. Miranda doesn’t really get any other friends. She briefly gets a boyfriend, but then they don’t talk for weeks (and she never considers trying to go see him) before he leaves town. She runs into her long-time skating idol and then convinces herself he was a figment of her imagination and never tries to meet up with him again. She complains about feeling isolated, but makes no effort to see people. I understand the whole Swiss Family Robinson self-reliance thing the family had going, but I think it’s truly bizarre Pfeffer decided to essentially completely isolate them from the town. The reason people survived in hard situations in times gone by is through an intense sense of community. You NEED the other people around you to survive. It’s very hard to do it by yourself. That’s why exile/banishment was so bad.
For the most part, Pfeffer avoids the images of violence of the apocalypse by just keeping the family in their house. That’s a little refreshing, but also a little frustrating. I WISH I knew more what was going on in the other parts of the world, even in the town itself. What the hell happened to everyone else?
The situation was very compelling—what would you do if the world as you knew it violently ended, and you were left with only yourself and your family? But there were flaws. The characters were fairly thin. The ending seemed like a deux ex machina. The self-imposed isolation by the family was frustrating. Still, an interesting take on the end of Life As We Know It.