Life as We Knew It

First published in America, this powerful novel is a worthy successor to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic The Long Winter . The enemy is still the weather, but this time the result not of natural causes but turned upside down by a catastrophic collision between an asteroid and the moon. 15-year-old Miranda, up to that time leading a normal teenage life in Pennsylvania, now has to cope with floods, no sun, civil chaos, the spread of disease and, most ominously of all, that gradual disappearance of her family’s hastily put together emergency food store. This novel, written as if it were her personal diary, shows her trying to cope with all these new pressures while still going through late adolescence and the whole process of developing a new personality. It is very well done; Miranda – neither saint nor sinner – learns new lessons in how to survive every day, and only just avoids dying of starvation. Cut off from urban life by living in the remote countryside, her family does not witness the breakdown of society at first hand. The concentration instead is on Miranda’s relationship with her heroic mother, saintly older brother and lively younger one. Perhaps she is a little too good and mature to be true, but hey, with a doom-laden plot like this, readers need some encouragement to make it to the end themselves. Those that do, and there should be many, will be rewarded by a story that is genuinely unforgettable.