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Summary
Summary
The heart-wrenching companion to the best-selling novels Life As We Knew It and The Dead & The Gone .
It's been a year since a meteor collided with the moon, catastrophically altering the earth's climate. Miranda and her two brothers spend their days scavenging for food and household items, while their mother stays at home and desperately tries to hold on to the ordinary activities of their previous life. But they all know that nothing is truly normal in this surreal new world they live in.
The struggle to survive intensifies when Miranda's father and stepmother arrive with a baby and three strangers in tow. One of the newcomers is Alex Morales, and as Miranda's complicated feelings for him turn to love, his plans for his future thwart their relationship. Then a devastating tornado hits the town of Howell, and Miranda makes a decision that will change their lives forever.
Author Notes
Susan Beth Pfeffer was born in New York City in 1948, and grew up in the city and its nearby suburbs. At the age of six, when her father wrote and published a book, Pfeffer decided she, too, wanted to be a writer; that year, she wrote her first story. She didn't write her first published book, until much later. Just Morgan, a young adult novel, was written during her final semester at New York University, and published the following year.
Since then, Pfeffer has been a full-time writer for young people. She has won numerous awards and citations for her work, which ranges from picture books to middle-grade and young-adult novels and includes both contemporary and historical fiction. Her young adult novel About David was awarded the South Carolina Young Adult Book Award. Her young adult novel The Year Without Michael, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and winner of the South Carolina Young Adult Book Award, was named by the American Library Association as one of the hundred best books for teenagers written between 1968-1993.
Pfeffer has also written a book for adults on writing for children. She has written over 60 books for children and young adults.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The protagonists of Pfeffer's novels The Dead and the Gone and Life As We Knew It join forces in this third installment of a harrowing saga set in the not so distant future. A year after the moon was thrown off course by a meteor, natural disasters and climate changes on Earth are still making mere existence a challenge. Miranda's family is barely scraping by on food rations when Miranda's father, stepmother, their baby, and three other refugees show up unexpectedly. Despite there now being more mouths to feed, Miranda's mother welcomes them, and Miranda finds herself falling in love with Alex, one of the refugees, as they spend hours together, scavenging abandoned houses for essentials. Pfeffer masterfully evokes the cold, colorless world in which her characters reside. Moments of relief are frequently tinged with horror, as when Miranda and Alex must bypass a rotting corpse to get to a horde of food. Still, hope is never completely extinguished. Throughout, readers will be moved by displays of compassion, strength, and faith as characters endure grim realities and face an uncertain future. Ages 12-up. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
The final installment in Pfeffer's dystopian trilogy (following Life As We Knew It and The Dead and the Gone) about how an asteroid-strike on the moon devastates Earth brings Alex, from the second book, to teen narrator Miranda's house. As usual, Pfeffer skillfully builds tension while showing how characters survive--or don't--in a world of dwindling resources. Copyright 2010 of The Horn Book, Inc. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In Life as We Knew It (2006), readers met 16-year-old Miranda, living in rural Pennsylvania when a meteor hits the moon, causing chaos and carnage throughout the world. In The Dead and the Gone (2008), the same event in New York City is chronicled through the eyes of Alex Morales. Now, through rather improbable circumstances, the two teens meet when Alex and sister Julie, tagging along with Miranda's father, wife, and infant, show up in Pennsylvania. It's been a year since the meteor hit, and though there's a new normalcy, it involves hunger, a lack of sunlight, and redistributing goods from the homes of the dead. This seems a more rushed effort than the previous books. Whys and hows are barely answered (the newcomers have done quite a bit of traveling, considering it's by foot), and Alex and Miranda's relationship goes from dislike to romance in literally the turn of the page. Still, fans are invested by now, and though this could (and probably should) be the last book in the series, the door is open for more.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2010 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Gr 7 Up-Listeners do not have to be familiar with the first two titles-Life As We Knew It (2006) and Dead and Gone (2008)-in Susan Beth Pfeffer's "Last Survivors" trilogy to understand the final installment (2010, all Harcourt and Listening Library) about the aftereffects of the destruction of the Moon by a meteor resulting in the death of millions of people and the alteration of the Earth's climate. There's just enough exposition to enable listeners to jump right in. The tone swings wildly from adventure to romance to disillusionment as Miranda writes in her diary about these consequences. She and her family are held by inertia, barely getting by on subsistence rations from the government. When her father shows up with his new wife and child and three other people, melding the two disparate groups, it stretches the food supply and exposes the survivor's mentality in them all. When another disaster strikes, Miranda is forced to make a desperate, life changing decision. While Emily Bauer doesn't differentiate much between character voices, she does a fine job of riding the edge of Miranda's emotions, clearly voicing her pessimism, excitement, heartbreak, and fear. Fans of dystopian novels will find plenty to enjoy here.-Charli Osborne, Oxford Public Library, Oxford, MI (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Palpable despair is dappled with tiny flares of hope in this third entry in Pfeffer's enthralling series about the aftereffects of a meteor strike on the Moon that has altered the earth's gravitational pull. Set a year after the cataclysmic event, the back story is efficiently summarized and readers are reintroduced to Miranda, the teen whose journal entries formed the narrative of the first installment. When her missing father returns, he brings many others with him, includingAlex, the protagonist from the second in the series. The author once again creates an extremely satisfying blend of human drama and action. Grimly frightening imagery and spot-on depiction of day-to-day bleakness are emotionally potent. Unfortunately, the inevitable romance between Miranda and Alex is less so. Given the circumstances, it is believable that their relationship would be rushed, but the initial antagonistic tone set up between them still seems too easily resolved, resulting in a formulaic feel. However, fans of the first two will thrill to this latest and the loose ending will leave them hoping for more. (Science fiction. 12 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 April 25I'm shivering, and I can't tell if it's because something strange is going on or because of the dream I had or just because I'm in the kitchen, away from the warmth of the woodstove. It's 1:15 a.m., the electricity is on, and I'm writing in my diary for the first time in weeks.I dreamed about Baby Rachel. I dream about her a lot, the half sister I've never met. Not that I know if Lisa had a girl or a boy. We haven't heard from Dad and Lisa since they stopped here on their way west, except for a couple of letters. Which is more than I got from anyone else who's left.Rachel was about five in my dream, but she changes age a lot when I'm sleeping, so that wasn't disturbing. She was snuggled in bed and I was reading her a bedtime story. I remember thinking how lucky she was to have a real bedroom and not have to sleep in the sunroom with Mom and Matt and Jon the way I have for months now.Then in the dream the lights went out. Rachel wanted to know why."It's because of the moon," I said.She giggled. A real little-girl giggle. "Why would the moon make the lights go out?" she asked.So I told her. I told her everything. I explained how in May an asteroid hit the moon and knocked it a little closer to Earth, and how the moon's gravitational pull got stronger, and everything changed as a result. There were tidal waves that washed away whole cities, and earthquakes that destroyed the highways, and volcanic eruptions that threw ash into the sky, blocking out sunlight, causing famine and epidemics. All because the moon's gravitational pull was a little bit stronger than before."What's sunlight?" she asked.That was when the dream turned into a nightmare. I wanted to describe sunlight, only I couldn't remember what the sky looked like before the ash blocked everything. I couldn't remember blue sky or green grass or yellow dandelions. I remembered the words--green, yellow, blue--but you could have put a color chart in front of me, and I would have said red for blue and purple for yellow. The only color I know now is gray, the gray of ash and dirt and sadness.It's been less than a year since everything changed, less than a year since hunger and darkness and death have become so commonplace, but I couldn't remember what life--life the way I used to know it--had been like. I couldn't remember blue.But there was Baby Rachel, or Little Girl Rachel, in her little girl's room, asking me about how things were, and I looked at her, and she wasn't Baby Rachel anymore. She was me. Not me at five. Me the way I was a year ago, and I thought, That can't be. I'm here, on the bed, telling my half sister a bedtime story. And I got up (I think this was all the same dream, but maybe it wasn't; maybe it was two dreams and I've combined them), and I walked past a mirror. I looked to make sure I was really me, but I looked like Mrs. Nesbitt had when I found her lying dead in her bed last fall. I was an old woman. A dead old woman.It probably was two dreams, since I don't remember Baby Rachel after the part where I got up. Not that it matters. Nothing matters, really. What difference does it make if I can't picture blue sky anymore? I'll never see it again, anyway, or yellow dandelions or green grass. No one will, nowhere on Earth. None of us, those of us who are still lucky enough to be alive, will ever feel the warmth of the sun again. The moon's seen to that.But horrible as the dreams were, they weren't what woke me. It was a sound.At first I couldn't quite place it. I knew it was a sound I used to hear, but it sounded alien. Not scary, just different.And then I figured out what the sound was. It was rain. Rain hitting against the roof of the sunroom.The temperature's been warming lately, I guess because it's spring. But I couldn't believe it was rain, real rain, and not sleet. I tiptoed out of the sunroom and walked to the front door. All our windows are covered with plywood except for one in the sunroom, but it's nighttime and too dark to see anything anyway, unless you open the door.It really is rain.I don't know what it means that it's raining. There was a drought last summer and fall. We had a huge snowstorm in December and then another one later on, but it's been too cold and dry for rain.I probably should have woken everyone up. It may never rain again. But I have so few chances to be alone. The sunroom is the only place in the house with heat, thanks to the firewood Matt and Jon spent all summer and fall chopping. We're in there together day and night.I know I should be grateful that we have a warm place to live. I have a lot to be grateful for. We've been getting weekly food deliveries for a month now, and Mom's been letting us eat two meals a day. I'm still hungry, but nothing like I used to be. Matt's regained the strength he lost from the flu, and I think Jon's grown a little bit. Mom's gotten back to being Mom. She insists we clean the house as best we can every day and pretend to do some schoolwork. She listens to the radio every evening so we have some sense of what's happening in other places. Places I'll never get to see.I haven't written in my diary in a month. I used to write all the time. I stopped because I felt like things were as good as they were ever going to get, that nothing was going to change again.Only now it's raining. Something's changed. And I'm writing again. Excerpted from This World We Live In by Susan Beth Pfeffer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
