(Note: While this review will not contain spoilers for This World We Live In, it may inadvertently reveal plot surprises from Life As We Knew It and The Dead & The Gone. As always, I recommend reading books in a series in order.)

The apocalypse may have come for Miranda Evans and Alex Morales, but I'm not ready for their stories to end. That's why reading This World We Live In, the last installment in Susan Beth Pfeffer's excellent series, made me so sad. Somehow, I missed the memo announcing it would be the last book. *Sniff*

It's now been a year since an asteroid hit the moon, causing widespread disaster all over the world. Massive tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and disease have decimated cities and towns all over the U.S. Miranda, her mother and her two brothers have survived - barely - through a combination of hard work, strategic rationing and scavenging abandoned houses for necessities. Isolated in the small town of Howell, Pennsylvania, they're one of the few families to have emerged from the disaster intact. Still, keeping themselves alive is no easy feat. Electricity's spotty, their food supplies are dwindling, and the plumes of ash in the air make it nearly impossible to breathe.

So many are missing or dead that Miranda holds out only a very slim hope of seeing her father again. When he finally shows up on her doorstep, she's overjoyed. The only problem is he's not alone. He's brought his new wife, of course, and their baby, along with an older man named Charlie and siblings Alex and Julie Morales. Along with the problem of feeding the newcomers come issues with so many people sharing one space. A colicky baby, divorced parents, and a brother who's about ready to explode make for a tense household. Then, there's Alex. Miranda hardly knows how to act around a boy her age, it's been so long since she's even seen one. And this particular specimen is a prickly one. Even after he and Miranda grow close, Alex is determined to drop Julie off at a nearby convent then tromp off to some monastery in Ohio. He begs Miranda to come along, but can she really leave her family behind in Pennsylvania? Is there truly a safe place anywhere or is Alex just dreaming?

In one disastrous night, everything changes. Death finally visits the ragtag Evans family, Miranda's plagued with a terrible secret, and everyone's forced to make a decision about the future. If there even is a future.

As riveting as the first two books in the series, This World We Live In continues a tale that is at once horrifying, fascinating and absolutely engrossing. There's the familiar grapple for survival; the inevitable tension between people forced to live together 24/7 with no escape, no privacy, no break from worry, fear and frustration; and the heartbreaking reminiscings of a teenage girl who longs for life as it never will be again. Pfeffer offers something new in this final book - romance. The idea of love - however fragile and desperate - brings a hopeful feel to an otherwise bleak tale. Most interesting, though, are the questions Pfeffer poses by bringing Miranda's father and his band of "strangers" into the story: Where do one's moral obligations lie in a world gone mad - to family only? To those who join it, even when their motives are less than pure? What about helpless strangers? And what role does faith play when it seems pretty clear that God's gone M.I.A.?

I've mentioned before that The Last Survivors series should probably not be read by anyone who's already panicked about the end of the world. Pfeffer's books are not nice, comfortable stories with happy, bow-tied endings. They're dark, disturbing, thought-provoking and completely mesmerizing. I haven't been able to get the story off my mind since I started Life As We Knew It. Even though the series is directly responsible for several recent nightmares, I can't get enough of it. Really, I can't. C'mon, Susan Beth Pfeffer, this isn't really the end, is it?

(Readalikes: Life As We Knew It and The Dead & The Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer; the Gone series by Michael Grant)

If this were a movie, it would be rated: PG for language, mature themes

To the FTC, with love: I bought this one off Amazon with the millions I make from my lucrative career as a book blogger - ha ha.

Hogwarts Reading Challenge: Read this one for Astronomy class :) [+1 for HufflePuff!]

For as long as I can remember, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (The Mormons) has strongly encouraged its members to stockpile a year's supply of food. No one's saying the world's going to end tomorrow, but church leaders want everyone to be prepared to survive any kind of disaster, be it a hurricane, an earthquake, drought or just economic instability. This counsel has been preached for so long that members' reactions to it run the gamut - some hoard obsessively, others laugh off the advice, while most do their best to lay in a year's worth of supplies. I'm a middle-roader. I've got a decent stockpile. Up until the other day, I figured it would be good enough to tide my family over in case of an emergency. Then, I read Susan Beth Pfeffer's Life As We Knew It. Guess who's ready to buy Costco out of every can of food it has in stock?

When the book begins, it's May 7, an ordinary day. Through Miranda's diary entries, we learn that she's a typical teenaged girl - she's worried about her French grade, irritated with her best friend-turned religious zealot, obsessed with a local ice skater, and excited to get her driver's license. By May 18, ordinary no longer exists. Forget French and driving and ice skating, Miranda's now obsessed with one thing only: survival.

It's the asteroid that does it. Instead of just providing a spectacular lights display, it smacks the moon with enough force to slam it closer to Earth. "It was still our moon," says Miranda, "and it was still just a big dead rock in the sky, but it wasn't benign anymore. It was terrifying." The impact causes chaos all over the world - tsunamis wash away coastal cities, floods submerge whole states, earthquakes rumble across the globe, and long-dormant volcanoes erupt, clogging the air with ash. As food supplies run out, sickness spreads, gas climbs to $15 a gallon, and the death toll rises, staying alive becomes the only thing that matters. In Pennsylvania, Miranda's family is facing an early winter (it's 42 degrees in August) with no electricity, a few cans of food, and little hope of rescue. Can they survive? Is there even a reason to live anymore?

I keep comparing Life As We Knew It to Gone, which tells a similar story. I've been trying to figure out why the former freaked me out so much more than the latter. I finally decided that Gone's furiously-paced plot keeps things moving so fast there's little time to really consider the horror of the situation the author describes. Life As We Knew It, on the other hand, is a much quieter story. As Miranda pens ever more desperate entries in her diary, we feel her hunger, her anger, her hopelessness. We also see her courage, her strengths and her weaknesses. Considering our current economy and the devastation in Haiti, it's frightfully easy to imagine ourselves in Miranda's place.

Although the story's both bleak and disturbing, it's also undeniably compelling. It starts off a little rocky (the beginning's a teensy bit slow and the writing's bumpy), but Life As We Knew It quickly becomes the kind of story that just takes your breath away. The characters, the setting - everything - is so vivid that closing the book almost feels like waking up. That's how absorbing it is.

If you're already depressed over the state of the world, I recommend you skip this one, but if you're up for some tense, engrossing post-apocalyptic fiction or if you just need some motivation to gather your year's supply of food, Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer is the book for you.

Readalikes: Gone series by Michael Grant; also reminds me a little of The Diary of Anne Frank)

Grade: B

If this were a movie, it would be rated: PG for language, mild sexual innuendo and mature themes

To the FTC, with love: This one came from the library.