Life As We Knew It

Book: Life As We Knew It
Author: Susan Beth Pfeffer
Audience: Teen
In a Nutshell: the moon gets closer and wreaks havoc

Sixteen-year-old Miranda is living the life of a normal high school girl until a meteor hits the moon and knocks it just a little bit closer. What with the moon controlling tides and all, giant tsunamis immediately destroy cities on any and all coasts around the world. Then the weather gets severely rainy, then severely hot, followed by severely cold and snowy: basically severe all around. And did I mention the dozens of instantly active volcanoes that blot out the sun with a constant grey layer of ash? There's also that. Miranda, her mother, younger brother Johnny, and older brother Matt must work harder and harder to survive as the power goes out, the well dries up, the food stores get lower and lower, and just when you think things couldn't get much worse, they do.

Good journal-style survival story with a twist: part surviving, part family drama as they all try to get along in increasingly close quarters and realize just how much they're willing to give up for each other.

I listened to this one on CD, and it was an okay reading by Emily Bauer. Too sweet-sounding for me; I read the first chapter on paper, and the voice doesn't match what I imagined at all. Still, an interesting addition to the survival story bookshelf.

Specials

Book: Specials (Book 3 of the Uglies trilogy)
Author: Scott Westerfeld
Audience: Teen
In a Nutshell: bio-engineered superteens overcome their brainwashing and save the world

Oh, how I love Scott Westerfeld's books. And oh, how I love it when authors finish strong on a good trilogy. I can now rest easy at night knowing that I can recommend Uglies and Pretties without fear of readers getting shafted by Book 3. Not that I've been losing whole lot of sleep over this, but you get the idea.

When we last left Tally Youngblood, she had been caught by the Specials, led by her former best friend, Shay. Since then, she's had the "special" surgery herself, where they enhanced her strength, speed, senses, and more, basically turning her into a predatory super-human who comes across as scary to normal pretties for primal reasons they are only vaguely aware of.

Tally loves her new body, her new tight relationship with the other Specials, and loves the new feelings of power and superiority that come with it. Their latest assignment is to figure out where the rebel New Smoke camp has moved to, and report back. But they run into more resistance from the Smokies than they expected, and Tally and Shay are caught in a swirl of right and wrong and power and greed, and it's up to them to use their gifts to chose a side and fight for it. Hundreds of years of peace between the cities hangs in the balance. There's also David and Zane to consider. David, the Smoky whom both Tally and Shay have loved when they were young and foolish and now just resent; and Zane, Tally's boyfriend whose brain got fried in the last book trying to become permanently "bubbly" and lucid, free from the brain lesions that keep the population docile. Tally thought he was dead, but surprise! He's not.

I've really tried to keep this blurb short and simple, but after three books of build-up that's no easy task. There's so much action, adventure, survival, gore, intriguing social commentary, love and life and death and stuff blowing up. Just trust me: good books. Very good books. Read the very good books.