- Release Date : 2006
- Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Pages : 337
- Genre : Science Fiction/Survivalist/Contemporary
I picked this book up for my book club
not knowing anything about it. I was interested in it because it was
discussed as being Dystopian and I hadn’t read a Dystopian in a while. However, I found this less Dystopic and more of a small-scale survivalist story. This isn’t the story about how a teen is going to save the end of the world.
. . But how she is going to survive it.
Life As We Knew It will have you thinking twice about what it means to survive and the importance of family. A great read if you are looking a more realistic ‘end of the world’ YA novel.
Life As We knew It
is the gripping tale of a family’s survival in the midst of a global disaster. Told through the diary of 16-year-old
Miranda, each day presents the challenges that come with daily survival for her brothers and Mom after a surprise astrological
event changes the world as they knew it.
The novel works off a what-if scenario where an asteroid knocks the moon closer to Earth. The gravitational pull floods the coastlines, activates dormant volcanoes, creates communication blackouts and brings on harsh early winters. Despite the book’s dark tones and hardships it touches on the perseverance and strength of a family when they have nothing left but each other.
The use of diary entries as a storytelling technique limited the writing and at times it did feel a little
repetitive. I found myself wanting to see what was happening outside of the diary. While parts of this book were nightmare inducing other parts could be a little hard to believe. The family catches a lot of lucky breaks and a few storylines seem to disappear, though they might come back in the other books.
Published in 2006 before the big YA boom I liked that this doesn’t fall into a lot of the tropes I see in YA Fiction now. For example, parents and other adults are actually useful and don’t disappear. Miranda’s mom has to be the strongest character in this story, she sacrifices everything to keep her family together and healthy. Another plus for me was that even though the parent’s are divorced the dad isn’t one of the Jerk-Dads I’ve been reading about lately.
1/2 of the blogging duo at Books and Sensibility, I have been blogging about and reviewing books since 2011. I read any and every genre, here on the blog I mostly review Fantasy, Adult Fiction, and Young Adult with a focus on audiobooks.