the dead & the gone

Reader reviewed by mearley

This is not really a sequel but more of a companion novel to Life As We Knew It. The events of the two books take place simultaneously. While Life As We Knew It focuses on a family in a small Midwestern town, The Dead and the Gone focuses on a Puerto Rican family in New York City. The Morales family faces many of the same challenges that Miranda faced (rationing food, sporadic electricity, constant wondering what will become of everyone), but the setting of the city brought presented the problems in a different way.

In both books, there is much more going on than just the fight to survive. In Life As We Knew It, Miranda has a love/hate relationship with her mother. In The Dead and the Gone, Alex finds both comfort and torment from his faith. He prays for the safety of his family, but he is also forced to make some ethically questionable decisions which make him wonder about the state of his soul.

As with the previous book, The Dead and the Gone ends on a note of optimism but without really letting the reader know for sure if everything will be fine in the end. Either one of these books would be great choices for a teen book club.

Reprinted here with author's permission.

Reader reviewed by Alissa

This amazing sci-fi story is about teenagers coping with natural disasters that are destroying the earth. The moon has moved much closer to the earth, courtesy of an asteriod, and natural disasters are rapidly killing everyone. This book, like its predecessor LIFE AS WE KNEW IT, focuses on the events that occur right before and in the months following the moon's shift. The children's parents are missing and the eldest brother is away in the military as the book begins, so the seventeen year old son is in charge of his two younger sisters. We know very little about what is happening worldwide, since there is no television, no newspapers, and the family can not afford a computer. So, even in the brief moments they have electricity, they can not find out what is going on beyong their immediate area. Living in New York City, the reader learns the horrific damage that is happening there, which gets worse every day. The book follows a type of journal format but, unlike LIFE AS WE KNEW IT, it is not told from the main character's point of view - it is told in the third person. This is an amazing book with characters you will come to love. As you read it, you feel as though you are living through the experience with them. Anyone who loves young adult literature should get to this book ASAP (it will be out in June). It is a quick, fun, thought provoking, exciting read.