Moore Week 3 - Life As We Knew It Review

     

    Life As We Knew It is a small book published in 2006 by Susan Beth Pfeffer. It’s probably a book that most people have never heard of, but it’s actually my favorite book. It’s about a teenage girl’s perspective on, essentially, the end of the world. In the book, an asteroid hits the moon, shifting it closer to the earth. This affected the tidal waves causing giant tsunamis to wipe out cities along the coast and made the volcano erupt in Yellowstone, clouding the sky with ash for months. 

It sounds kind of cheesy when I look back on it, but it actually gets very real as the book goes on. Instead of focusing on the teenage girl’s journey to saving the world like some novels, it focuses on her family’s survival and their struggle to have the basic necessities like food, water, and heat. She lives in a small town in Pennsylvania where almost everyone leaves in search of food, leaving her family isolated throughout winter without electricity. The book focuses on how her family fought to find other people, and how her family survived by themselves. 

In some ways, I feel like I can relate to the main character, Miranda. She’s a teenage girl in suburban Pennsylvania living through a completely abnormal experience. Although instead of living through the apocalypse like her, I’m living through a pandemic. The beginning of the apocalypse in the book is actually very similar to how the beginning of the pandemic was back in the spring of 2020. In the book, people rushed to grocery stores to stock up on food before it all disappeared, just like how at the beginning of the pandemic people panicked and stocked up on toilet paper and food causing grocery stores to have major shortages. School closing in real life was actually very similar to how schools closed in the book as well. 

All in all, I really love the book and the entire series too. There are four books in the series, the second one follows a boy who lives in New York City, the third one then joins Miranda’s story with the boy’s story, and then the fourth book is about Miranda’s little brother in the future. I liked how the series has a character that I can relate to, and that it’s a thrilling book since it’s so realistic. At least I know from the book that if an asteroid hits the moon, we’ll most likely survive it since we live in the same area as the characters.

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