Life As We Knew It

#508
Title: Life As We Knew It
Author: Susan Beth Pfeffer
Publisher: Harcourt
Year: 2006
345 pages

A climate-change dystopia, more or less. An asteroid hits and moves the moon, a great starting point, though the science is sketchy. The moon is 238,000 miles away and it would take a while to be able to see that it had been pushed closer to the earth. This may be a nitpick, but an author who's proposed a scientific explanation for the action loses credibility when her science is bad. Those of us who learned about logarithms or the difference between weight and mass from reading Heinlein as children know this to be true, and if I could figure out how to use a slide rule from Heinlein at this book's target audience age, I would have noticed this problem with the moon and put this book down. Now as an adult who's forgotten how to use a slide rule, I read on, though with greater skepticism than I would have otherwise.

Beyond this initial flaw, the novel is engaging and absorbing. I appreciated that Pfeffer didn't wrap up all the stories happily. The characters' difficulties make sense and may resonate with readers' uncertainties about how you know there's a problem, and how big that problem is. If you enjoy thinking about how you'd survive without much infrastructure, you'll enjoy strategizing about how the characters can save themselves when they are essentially off the grid.