Life As We Knew It

Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Let me just share a little bit – movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact scarred the living daylights out of me.  Any time I hear about a near miss asteroid passing the planet, I freak out.  With that in mind, Life As We Knew It was probably one of the most terrifying books I’ve ever read.

Presented entirely in diary format, our main character Miranda is a normal high school sophomore.  She has fights with her mom, has problems at school, pretty standard stuff.  She and her neighbors gather to watch a meteor on a near miss course with Earth.  Unexpectedly, the meteor impacts the moon, shifting its orbit, and causing worldwide catastrophe.  Tides change and tsunamis wipe out all coastal cities.  The closer orbit of the moon causes tectonic plates to shift and volcanoes to erupt, throwing a cloud of ash that covers the entire planet.

Scary stuff.  What Pfeffer does that makes all of this so effective is keep most of it off the page.  All of the really scary stuff is heard second hand.  Power is lost nearly immediately, and all forms of media are gone.  The only news is word of mouth.  Miranda and her family live in rural Pennsylvania, away from major epicenters of disaster, but word of mouth is almost more terrifying than if Pfeffer had placed her protagonist in the thick of it.  People fight over food.  Gas shoots up to $20 a gallon.  Medical supplies run out quickly and simple diseases become fatal.  Again, very little of this is shown, only talked about.  They are very isolated in their rural area, but the devastation is crystal clear.

Miranda as a character is interesting.  At points, she is very unlikeable.  She is very selfish in very difficult situations.  But as the first year in this new world wears on, and food begins to disappear, Miranda becomes a much more selfless person.  She begins to think less about her wants and needs as well as her own survival and more about the survival of her mother and brothers.

Pfeffer has a follow up to this coming out in June, The Dead and the Gone, which takes the same event and situation, but sets it in an urban environment.  Her apparent reluctance to show violence may be tested in a more dangerous setting, but I’m excited to see this world with a different set of eyes.  For anyone who enjoys end of the world fiction, this is perfect.  I do not categorize this as science-fiction, because I think that term conjures up aliens and advanced technology.  This is a book about survival in an event that has, for now, only happened in speculative fiction.