Life as We Knew It

Life as We Knew It

By Susan Beth Pfeffer

Harcourt, 2006. 337 pages. Post-apocalyptic fiction.

ISBN: 9780152058265

Reading/Interest Level: 12+

Curriculum ties: Survival, preparedness, disasters

Booktalk Ideas: What would you do to survive?: Bring a 72-hour kit with the essentials and talk about the necessities of survival in a natural disaster. Then talk about Miranda’s situation and some of the situations her family faced.

Challenge Issues: Language

Challenge Response: First Defense File

Reader’s Annotation:

When the moon’s orbit changes, Earth isn’t prepared for the natural disasters that occur. Miranda and her family strive to survive and live life as normally as possible, but as time drags on without disaster relief, it’s not easy and not everyone will make it.

Plot Summary:

When an asteroid hits the moon and throws off its orbit, the world is thrown into chaos, the likes of which have never been seen. Every modern convenience soon becomes useless and families are cut off from the world and unable to get the assistance they need.

Miranda is sixteen years old and her life is turned upside down. As disaster after disaster occurs her mother starts to stockpile and ration food for the family. Miranda doesn’t see the necessity, she thinks that relief will come and everything will be okay. Even though she thinks her mom is overreacting, she goes along with it. Soon it becomes apparent to Miranda that her mom was right to stockpile everything she did. Electricity disappears, disease spreads, and Miranda’s friends start leaving town, or starving to death.

Miranda has a lot to deal with at sixteen years old, and if her entire family isn’t careful they will all end up suffering. Family bonds and trust will be paramount for survival.

Critical Evaluation:

This book is told through Miranda’s journal entries which was an excellent choice on the author’s part. Diary entries obviously make this a first person narrative, but we’re also privy to all of Miranda’s worries, fears, frustrations, sadness, and realizations in her own words and voice. A particularly moving moment came when Miranda realized that a friend of hers, Megan, has been starving herself and dies because of her religious beliefs.

Death is a constant threat for Miranda, her family and her community. There are lot of deaths in this book from Megan starving herself, to Mrs. Nesbitt freezing to death, to Peter dying from the flu. With each death, Miranda is forced to look at her life and the lives of those around her. She saw how Megan blindly followed her religious beliefs that lead to her death, and how Mrs. Nesbitt fully expected to die and knew that her death would be beneficial to Miranda’s family because they could use any of her supplies for themselves. When Miranda discovers that Peter also died, she really starts to lose hope that her family will make it out of this situation. When the food dwindles and Miranda realizes that if she’s gone the rest of her family will have a better chance of survival, similar to Mrs. Nesbitt’s death, she willingly walks into town fully expecting never to come home. All of these progressive deaths really add to and show the change that Miranda goes through.

About the Author:

Susan Beth Pfeffer was born in New York City in 1948. She grew up in the city and its nearby suburbs and spent summers in the Catskill Mountains. When she was six her father wrote and published a book on constitutional law, and Pfeffer decided that she, too, wanted to be a writer. That year she wrote her first story, about the love between an Oreo cookie and a pair of scissors. However, it wasn't until 1970 that her first book, Just Morgan, was published. She wrote it during her last semester at New York University; since then, she has been a full-time writer for young people.

She has won numerous awards and citations for her work, which range from picture books to middle-grade and young-adult novels, and include both contemporary and historical fiction. She is also the author of the popular Portraits of Little Women series for grades 3-6, and has written a book for adults on writing for children.

To date, she has written more than 60 books. About David was awarded the South Carolina Young Adult Book Award. The Year without Michael is an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and winner of the South Carolina Young Adult Book Award; it was also named by the American Library Association as one of the hundred best books for teenagers written between 1968-1993.

When she is not working, she enjoys watching movies, both new and old, and collecting movie memorabilia, reading biographies and histories, and eating foods that are bad for her. She lives in Middletown, New York, with her two cats, Alexander and Emily.

Named the American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services Association Best Book for Young Adults 2007 and Teens’ Top Ten Booklist in 2007. Finalist for the Andre Norton Award, Quill Awards, Hal Clement Awards.

-from GoodReads.com author page-

Justification of Selection:

This was an ALA “Best Books For Young Adults Readers in 2007” and is a great way to get teens to start talking about disaster preparedness with their family.