This World We Live In (Life As We Knew It Series)

Very well written, but realize this book is a sequel and you must read the first two to understand this one ( I also recommend those two books ) but this storyline is great with how the previous parallel novels come together in this book. ....the perfect balance of romance and action.

I was very much looking forward to this book, but have to agree with other reviewers: it was a disappointment. The first novel in the trilogy, Life As We Knew It, was an excellent story. The other two books were much weaker in terms of characters and plot.

I was looking forward to this book after the first two. I was dissapointed in this one, especially the ending. I thought it could have been better,expected better. Like the author was in a hurry to finish.

I purchased this series of books for my daughter who enjoyed the first book. Once she reads a book I usually read it as well. At the end of the series I was greatly disappointed! It was as if the author didn't know how to end the story. I'm also not sure if she has an issue with Puerto Ricans because she practically kills off the whole family. On the last page, I simply told my daughter you could have warned me. She said I had to have some one to share my fustration!

Rating: 4.5/5

Genre: YA Dystopian

Recommended Age: 15+ (sexual content, death, violence, slight gore)

Pages: 239

Author Website

the store Link

Disclaimer: None! I got this book for my own amusement!

Synopsis: It’s been a year since a meteor collided with the moon, catastrophically altering the earth’s climate. For Miranda Evans, life as she knew it no longer exists. Her friends and neighbors are dead, the landscape is frozen, and food is increasingly scarce.
The struggle to survive intensifies when Miranda’s father and stepmother arrive with a baby and three strangers in tow. One of the newcomers is Alex Morales, and as Miranda’s complicated feelings for him turn to love, his plans for his future thwart their relationship. Then a devastating tornado hits the town of Howell, and Miranda makes a decision that will change their lives forever.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a series so fast in my life. I’m absolutely in love with this series. In this book we are reunited with both of our faves: Miranda and Alex and they are amazing. This book is still in diary format and Miranda is the voice. I thought the voice was authentic and the character development was well done for the most part. I also thought the pacing and plot were intriguing enough to keep me entertained and engaged throughout the book.

However, I did think that there was an over abundance of insta love and I didn’t feel like Alex was well written in this book. He felt really one dimensional, which is sad because he’s my favorite character of the whole series. Also, I think the book didn’t start at exactly the same place it left off from the first book and the book was a bit slow for the first 50ish pages.

Verdict: If you read the first two book you need to read this one too!

I’m not sure how to summarize this book without giving away a bunch of spoilers! We’ve flipped back to Miranda’s family, but some previous characters that we don’t know what happened to show up in this third book in the series.

Check out book one here: Life As We Knew It

And book two here: The Dead and the Gone

I enjoyed this book as well, even though parts of this one seemed incredibly predictable and parts totally heartbreaking. The end was quite the thriller…read to see what I mean!

8 of 10 for enjoyment (only because of the ending. I understand it but I still just can’t give it a higher enjoyment rating because of that) and 4.5 of 5 for readability.

I guess perhaps I should have read/listened to the first 2 books in the series before listening to this book but I didn’t. I thought the book sounded interesting but I really wasn’t that impressed. Again, perhaps if I had read the first books in the series, I might be more vested in the characters but I did try my best to engage in the story and the characters but in reality, I thought nothing actually happened during the whole story. I know that sounds horrible and I realize something did actually occur or I would not have listened to 6 CD’s in my car but I felt that it could have all been condensed to perhaps one CD.
The author did a wonderful job setting the story up for those who didn’t read couple books. The characters are feeling the aftereffects of a major catastrophe as the moon was hit by a meteor and the world as we know it, no longer exists. Everyone is in survival mood, living off what they can find, scrambling to find anything. Rain, electricity and gas are hot commodities. Miranda is the main character and she got on my nerves immediately with her attitude, her moods constantly changing. When her father arrives with his wife and baby, this creates mixed emotions in the household. With limited resources stretched thin already, the family is excited about the new faces and new opportunities but now there are more mouths to feed. Miranda feels she is in love with Alex, a new individual who has arrived and as the outlook on the world looks dimmer, she feels this is her last opportunity at love. It’s now or never and it’s this attitude, her emotions and the other characters in her world that have me shaking my head. Go girl…..do whatever you want….act and then think later…..it’s this mentality that makes me like the other characters more.

The whining is just too much... way over the top. This book doesn't know what it wants to be. The fighting is over the top, the lack of survival skills by this time is embarrassing. There is not a lot of can-do attitudes it just seems like a lot of whining, praying, more whining, more prayers... When they are at the convent, they didn't even try to check things out - gather things that may be salvageable .. or when the van runs but the other cars do not... they couldn't jump the car from the van? Seriously... How about gathering when you are in better shape and do the runs almost daily for supplies... not just here and there. Just so many things are really off here. Starving to death but won't go out and dig for worms... those would have survived and there is protein in that.

If nothing else, Pfeffer's stories get you thinking. They force you to consider what you would do if you were in her characters' shoes - would you have stockpiled food up in case of an emergency? Or would you basically be at the mercy of this new world you live in?

Miranda is back as the narrator in this book, which I was excited about since I didn't really like Alex or Julie from The Dead and Gone. The book reads about as I expected it to - intense, gripping, and at times just chilling. It's graphic without being too graphic, and it really does make you think about what would happen to you in the same situation. I know I'll be stocking up emergency supplies a little more diligently from now on.

But that said, I didn't particularly like this book. Life As We Knew It, I couldn't put down, but I LIKED it. I couldn't put down This World either, but it was more because I wanted to finish it before I had to leave the bookstore than anything else. Miranda devolves from being a sympathetic character to basically being a whiny brat. She is still fighting with her mom? After all that's happened? I found that unbelievable and stupid. Matt's random relationship with Syl came out of nowhere and was totally out of character. And Syl was never really explored - she has no background story, and even admits to having a fake name, which why would you write about if you had no intention of exploring it?

I also found Lisa irritating and her obsession with Julie weird and frightening. There was no real point to Charlie's character, unless Pfeffer just wanted to make a point about the weight-loss surgery.

Where Alex was somewhat likable in The Dead, he was a total arrogant jerk throughout the entire book. Miranda's attraction to him seemed contrived and forced.

I waited a long time for this book, and I am so disappointed that it turned out like it did. If you can't make it a happy ending, that's totally fine - just don't flake out with a crappy, vague one.

I liked it better than The Dead, but much, much less than Life. This is one I might buy if I find it at a library sale, but it's really not worth normal book prices - especially not hardcover. What a shame.

It's been almost a year since an asteroid crashed into the Earth's moon, sending it just a bit closer to Earth and causing violent disruptions resulting in flooding, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes. Miranda Evans and her family have faced the year of deprivation in their home in Pennsylvania by accepting once weekly food deliveries from what's left of the government and pillaging the abandoned homes nearby. Life goes on, though sometimes it seems hopeless when so many are dying and there is no relief from the constant hunger and lack of electricity. Still, it's the life Miranda, her mother and two brothers have come to know, which is security in itself; then things change yet again when Miranda's brother Matt returns from a fishing trip with a wife and Miranda's father shows up with not only his wife and child, but three more people. How will they cope? How can they share? Will there ever be a return to a sense of normalcy?

This World We Live In is the third and final book in Susan Beth Pfeffer's trilogy about a catastrophe that changes everything. The book pretty much picks up not long after book one (book two being a companion story of Alex and his sister Julie, both of whom are in book three) and many of the same desperate situations still face the Evans family. Though things will never be the same, Miranda does begin to experience her first taste of love when she gets to know Alex, and her concerns are not so different than a normal teen's on many levels. The addition of the new characters to the Evans mix gives life to the idea of going to one of the secret "safe towns" and Miranda and her family have to determine what sort of world they will make out of the ashes of the one long gone.

This book is well told and utterly believable; I could see events transpiring precisely as Ms.Pfeffer depicts, and Miranda's musings are typical of anyone facing serious crisis in family and survival. In fact, I was loving this novel right up until the final three or four chapters when it seemed that the author just didn't know how to get her characters out of the bind they'd found themselves in. The ending just didn't seem to make a lot of sense to me and I just could not buy that characters who had struggled so long would make such life altering decisions when there were other options available. Still, this is a fascinating look at what would likely happen if such a natural disaster took place, and Ms. Pfeffer does give her characters complex emotions amid devastating circumstances. Recommended...with reservations about the final ending.

One last observation that really has nothing to do with the novel but bugs me just the same (and probably shows how shallow I am): Every time I look at the cover of this novel, I see a giant breast, not a moon. It was also the first thing my husband pointed out about the book when he saw me reading it. Am I alone in this observation? If so, that's okay, but I just felt the need to say someone needed to think about the cover art. Just sayin'.

Like the previous novels, This World We Live In is an emotional powerhouse. Gone are the events of the catastrophe. All that is left now are the few remaining pieces of humanity. Miranda and her family have survived the first year after the moon was struck by an asteroid. They have survived the floods, volcanoes, the hunger. Now all they can do is take each day one step at a time.

This World We Live In touches the reader deep in their soul. The novel is raw, gritty, and like exposing an open wound. Miranda's voice is a rarity. It is heartfelt, realistic, and at times brutally honest. There is something not only about her voice, but about this novel as a whole that sticks with you. You have an emotional connection to all of the characters, and it is almost as if you are transported into this world.

I absolutely adored very moment of this gut wrenching novel. You walk away from this series with a completely new perspective on life. An appreciation for everything around you. I only wish that Pfeffer had given me more closure, This is not a series that one expects a happy-ending for. However, not knowing what happens to the characters that I am so emotionally invested in bothers me. At this point, it is not clear if we are to see Miranda and her family again. But personally, I want more. I have to have that closure.

Something isn't right. Everything is dark. The town is practically deserted and electricity, food and school are scarce if not completely gone. Like the first book in this series, Life As We Knew It, the narrator is Miranda, high school student, ice skater and middle child.

This book starts a few months after the ending of the first book. Everyone is still living in the house, with windows boarded up and a dwindling stockpile of food and firewood. The most interesting part in the first book, I thought, was the effect of the enforced lack of privacy and increasing frailty of her friends on Miranda. Her reactions were true and heart wrenching. Being a teenage girl is a difficult time, but having to do it while sleeping in one room with your mother, older brother and little brother is intolerable.

With this newest book, the beginning is slow. We, the readers, already know the situation, so, luckily, the author doesn't retell us what's happened to leave Miranda's family in such a terrible situation, but the story, as told through Miranda's diary is dull.

There is a terrifying moment that happens early on involving her mother and instead of dwelling on the horror of a chance accident, the story moves on and relies instead on the side characters to liven things up. But strangely it's the lack of emotion from Miranda that seems to drag the story along in a more or less meandering way. I need an everyman to see the world in it's cruelty and beauty to really get this story.

On the plus side, there's a lot of realism in this book. Unlike book two, which took place in New York, the survivors in this book work hard to make a place for themselves and aren't afraid to use the resources left behind even if it means stealing.

All in all, I read the book, all of it and I liked it, but I didn't love it like I did the first book.

I really enjoyed the previous two books in this series. This World We Live In has been one of my most highly anticipated releases of this year aside from the impending conclusion to Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy, which may go down as the best YA series I have EVER read. All I can say about Pfeffer's third installation to the Last Survivor's series is that it does NOT disappoint. This is definitely not a stand-alone novel and as a reader, you are going to have to invest in the previous two segments, which are well worth it.

I found this book to be more satisfying in the relationship aspect because our two main characters from the first books finally come together and although the chemistry is somewhat off and on, it is satisfactory for those who have invested in Miranda and Alex's character developments.

As a fan of post-apocalyptic adventure sagas, I have to say that I have been extremely impressed with the depictions of all the turmoils our characters experience. The relationships and the intensity of the scenarios are excruciatingly believable and the author does an incredible job at evoking the necessary emotions. This book left me weeping at the end and that is a rare feet with most novels. I was so incredibly invested in all of the characters that I felt sorrow and despair at the last few chapters. Just having to say goodbye to these characters was heartwrenching! Sometimes it feels almost eerily realistic. As if this devastating tale was something that had truly happened in the world and not a work of fiction.

I am not sure if the author is planning another addition but I felt that she did a great job at leaving an open ending that worked in both senses. This book is an emotionally packed YA novel that will definitely appeal to fans of post apocolyptic type situations.

Interested in a teen take on the apocalypse, I picked up Life As We Knew It, Pfeffer's first in this series. I enjoyed it so much that when This World We Live In came up on my the store Vine Newsletter, I grabbed it. I quickly ordered the second in the series: The Dead and the Gone (The Last Survivors, Book 2) in order to get up to speed.

While I found Life As We Knew It, narrated in diary-style by Miranda Evans, enjoyable, I found the lack of dialogue clunky and difficult to read. This improved in the second in the series, The Dead and The Gone, narrated by Alex Morales, which was was not specifically written as a diary (though it is dated as such). Truthfully, while I enjoyed Alex's story, I thought the first book was more of a page turner, and I was looking forward to seeing the two storylines come together in This World We Live In.

Pfeffer did not disappoint on that front. The storylines came together as well as the characters--though I agree it was hard to understand HOW Miranda and Alex eventually found a connection when they despised each other so much throughout most of the book! This third entry in the series is written in diary format but reads much easier than the first with a heavy dose of additional dialogue and enough intrigue to keep the pages turning--though I must admit that I saw the ending coming.

A very enjoyable read--and I'm looking forward to the fourth book!