Life As We Knew It

It’s not that often that I come across a novel that makes me think, even after I finish it. Also, it’s not normal for me to enjoy Young Adult fiction either. Yet this book, Life as We Knew It, by Susan Pfeffer, ended up being one of those rare finds.

This unlikely gem of a book is centered around a doomsday scenario. A meteor hits the moon, which knocks it closer in orbit to the Earth and causes catastrophic climate change. This very scenario is one of the things that can keep the reader up at night in paranoia, since it could actually happen at some point during history. Pfeffer handled the events surrounding this event with realism, decency, and in a way that just fit the main character’s way of life. Such natural disasters as tsunami’s, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes were involved, not to mention the climate change from all of the volcanic ash. This last event is what affects the main characters in the story the most, since they don’t live near where any of the natural disasters are occurring.

Life as We Knew It is narrated through the journal entries of a sixteen-year-old girl named Miranda. It was chilling to read about her life, which was sunny and normal, change into this fight for survival against the planet, especially with such realistic writing involved.

This novel focuses on the struggles of one family to make it in this strange new world. Miranda, her two brothers Matt and Jonny, and their mother. Miranda’s family ends up better off than most, thanks to the frantic preparations of her mother after the asteroid hits. These include sending the family and their close friend repeatedly into a grocery store to buy essential items, stockpiling essential clothing items like thermal underwear, and saving the heating oil until the worst of the winter. At first Miranda thinks that her mother is as crazy as a loon, especially after rationing daily meals, but soon she comes to understand how essential all of this is.

The volcanic ash is probably the most disturbing of all of the natural disasters in this book. Since the moon’s gravitational pull has changed drastically, volcanic eruptions are constant, and they fill the air with this dusty ash, and have no signs of stopping. Not only does it make everything grey, it chokes out the sunlight, kills the crops, and makes the temperature plummet. It takes a long time to recover from such a disaster, if recovery is even possible, and it doesn’t help that this affects Miranda’s life the most out of all the horrible things that have happened.

Life as We Knew It is told through journal entries, written by none other than Miranda. I applaud Pfeffer for telling the story through this format, because really, it’s the best way to handle the story if you take the plot into perspective. If this novel had been told any other way, some parts would have ended up being very mundane, especially during the winter. Even though Miranda’s life is hard, it ends up being very repetitive, and using the journal entries is a practical and flawless way to highlight the events of each day.

But yet, it’s not the whole idea of a doomsday scenario that makes this book memorable. No matter what kind of first impression, this book isn’t about fear. Even though the tsunami’s, earthquakes, and related disasters are sad, this book has a much deeper message. Life as We Knew It is about triumphing over hardship, and the perseverance of the human spirit. This book reminds a person about how fragile our existence on Earth really is. Any day something could happen that would throw everything into chaos, and this novel leaves the reader with such a sense of thankfulness for what we really have. Even Miranda writes about how grateful she is to be alive, and how she wishes she had appreciated the wonderful, luxurious life of the past while she still could. If I could sum up the powerful moral to this story in one sentence, it would go something like this.

Appreciate what you have, because it might be gone tomorrow, but most of all, be grateful for the gift of life and the loved ones around you.

Through realistic writing, down-to-earth language, and an understanding of the teenage spirit, Susan Pfeffer has crafted a novel that make the reader grateful for what they have, even after that last page is finished and the pages are closed. Life as We Knew It is a novel that I definitely suggest giving a chance.