Module 8: Life as We Knew it by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Citation:

Pfeffer, S. (2008). Life As We Knew It. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Hardcourt.

Summary:

This novel is about a normal teenage girl named Miranda. Miranda is your typical misunderstood teenage girl who is trying to find her independence with her mother and life. All of a sudden Miranda’s world is altered forever when a meteor hits the moon which moves the moon closer to the earth. This alters not only Miranda’s life but the entire population of the world. At first the gravitational pull of the moon in relation to the earth changes the waters in the oceans thus causing many tsunamis throughout the world and many are pronounced dead. Eventually everything that people take for granted such as heating oil and stores being restocked with food and clothes comes to a halt.

Luckily Miranda’s mother, (who is divorced from Miranda’s father), has the foresight to raid store and stock up on every type of food and clothing that they see. Eventually the gas prices raise to almost $10.00 a gallon and gas is limited to 3 gallons of gas at a time. Miranda, her mother, and her two brothers along with their neighbor, Ms. Nezbits, have to figure out how they are going to survive in Pennsylvania with the lack of resources that most take for granted. Along their journey they must endure the freezing cold without a heater, with limited food, and contact with the rest of the world. They do survive many many deaths, the flu, and the large amounts of snow. Although life by the end of the book has not returned to “normal” it is better and they are brought rationed food.

My Opinion:

This book is an adventure of what life could possibly be like if the moon was to move closer to the earth and some of the catastrophic events that could take place. In my opinion this story could be somewhat depressing and also interesting to see how life as we currently know it could be altered to this level of just basic survival. It puts many things like internet into perspective. I found this story to be interesting and likeable and I would recommend to high school students.

Reviews:

Chen, D. (2010, March, 28). [Review of the book Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer]. School Library Journal Online. Retrieved by http://blog.schoollibraryjournal.com/practicallyparadise/2010/03/28/top-teen-titles-75-79/

School Library Journal (March 28, 2010) Miranda’s disbelief turns to fear in a split second when a meteor knocks the moon closer to the earth. How should her family prepare for the future when worldwide tsunamis wipe out the coasts, earthquakes rock the continents, and volcanic ash blocks out the sun? As summer turns to Arctic winter, Miranda, her two brothers, and their mother retreat to the unexpected safe haven of their sunroom, where they subsist on stockpiled food and limited water in the warmth of a wood-burning stove. Told in journal entries, this is the heart-pounding story of Miranda’s struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all–hope–in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar world. I discovered this book from blogs in 2007 and had to write my own post on my pre-SLJ blog DeepThinking.blogsome.com. I was feeling very full of myself and wittingly (in my own opinion) called the post "I’m a Pfeffer, He’s a Pfeffer, She’s…" I have some very interesting links to other points of interest so I hope you will click back and read. Since then two other titles have been released to extend this story and provide more viewpoints. Life As We Knew It is Miranda’s view. The Dead And The Gone is told from Alex’s viewpoint in New York City. This World We Live In brings both sets of characters together. Every week I hand Life As We Knew It to a student because I enjoyed reading it. Even though I found some of the selfish actions of the characters deplorable, I recognized their egocentricity as being realistic. Many teens recommended it for the best book of 2006. TeenReads.com, TeensReadToo, GoodReads, and LibraryThing provide links to positive (and some negative) reviews. My buddy Ed (Edward T.) Sullivan has written a downloadable pdf guide to Life As We Knew It. AWARDS: An ALA Best Book for Young Adults A Booklist Editors’ Choice A CCBC Choice A Junior Library Guild Premier Selection An Amazon.com Best Book of the Year A YALSA Teens’ Top Ten Book 2009 — Evergreen Young Adult Book Award (WA) Uses for the library: I think this would be a great book to take a key line out of to try to have the students guess which book did the line come from. I also think I would like to have a book club read this book and maybe one or two others and have the students play a trivia type game with the book.