This World We Live In by Susan Beth Pfeffer

This World We Live In by Susan Beth Pfeffer was heartbreaking. I had read Life as We Knew It and enjoyed it, but Pfeffer's third novel takes the post-meteor world to a completely different level. I couldn't put this down, it was unpredictable and exciting.

The novel starts out much the same as it left off in Life as We Knew It. We meet Miranda, Matt, Jon, and their mom again fighting to have food on the table every day, raiding houses for simple things like shampoo and toilet paper, and hoping the electricity will come on if only for a few hours. But when Miranda's dad shows up with six more people Miranda's family soon learns hard lessons like hunger, grief, and even love. Miranda and her family along with fighting for survival must believe in hope and what it means for each of them. For Miranda, it was the hardest to find.

I was introduced to a few new characters since I didn't read The Dead and the Gone but I don't think it left me at a disadvantage at all. I instantly feel in love with Alex and Julie and I think readers will too. Alex is a strong older brother who discovers throughout the book that their may not be a set of principles in this new world to "be good". Miranda and Alex together were real. I felt that if I were ever to live in that world, that's the kind of desire and I would have. All the relationships in this novel were scarily real. It's almost as if Pfeffer knew how to place the world she created within our world so well that I'm afraid one day I might actually have to live in it.

The scariest thing about this novel was how real it is. Who's to say a meteor won't move the moon a little closer? One of the parts of this novel that struck me the most (besides the end, which, is amazing and heartbreaking at the same time) was when Miranda found a mound of bodies when she ran away. In that mound there were people she knew. Just piled there. Pfeffer didn't even need to paint that picture vividly for me to get a sense of the tragedy. And when I read that I felt something awful, more than words could describe.

This novel was face-paced, exciting, and I kept reading to know what was going to happen next. Reading this novel you really see the character development and feel something deep for all of them. Pfeffer did a fabulous job putting real people in a world that could be real and creating love and hope out of grief and hopelessness. I definitely reccommend it to everyone!

Rating: 5.0

I received this copy via Net Galley.





Happy Reading!