The first book in this trilogy grabbed my attention and didn't let go. It made you think about "what if something hit the moon". The 2nd book in the series was okay but felt like it was retelling the events just from a different location. The 3rd book (this one) was a dissapointment. The author attempts to blend the first two books characters into one story in the final book with horrible results. The characters seem stiff and one-sided in this book and the interactions between them are forced. It was like watching a bad movie where the actors have no chemistry. It is apparent to the reader as you move thru the story and the author was trying to scrape up enough story to make a 3rd book when in essence she didn't have a story line period.

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Reviewed by Karin Librarian for TeensReadToo.com

A year has passed since a meteor collided with the moon, sending it closer to the earth, and forever changing the world. In LIFE AS WE KNEW IT, Miranda chronicles the events her family experiences as they struggle for survival during dramatic weather changes, loss of friends, and dangerous food shortages.

The companion novel, THE DEAD & THE GONE, follows the hardships of Alex and his sisters in New York City. The author paints a more gruesome side of life in this installment. One that stays with the reader long after the book is closed.

THIS WORLD WE LIVE IN brings the two stories together.

Once again, we see Miranda at home with her mother and two brothers as they continue to eke out a living. They find ways to deal with lack of food, poor air quality, cold temperatures, and no electricity. Even though they are doing okay now, Miranda knows it won't always be like this. The food deliveries might stop and then what would they do? Miranda's mother rejects any suggestion of leaving , but Miranda knows there will come a time when they'll have no choice.

Miranda's brothers leave for a fishing trip in an attempt to supplement the provisions they receive weekly from town. Matt and Jon bring back a lot more than fish. While fishing, they run into a band of travelers including Miranda's father, his new wife, Lisa, and their new baby, Gabriel. Also traveling with them is a man named Charlie and a brother and sister named Alex and Julie. As if that weren't enough, Matt meets a girl named Syl and claims her as his wife.

If supplies were dangerously low before, adding six more people to the mix made it downright frightening. Everyone struggled - with issues of privacy, issues of jealously, and issues of conscience.

THIS WORLD WE LIVE IN returns the reader to the first-person diary format of LIFE AS WE KNEW IT. Miranda documents her changing life as she talks about her growing family, her complicated feelings for Alex, and the grotesque discoveries that still seem to pop up even after a year. Their lives settle into a new routine until an unthinkable disaster rips through town. Miranda and her family are forced to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives if they want to survive in the world they live in now.

Susan Beth Pfeffer gives her readers what they've wanted. Personally, I'm very glad she went back to the first-person diary format. Even though there were times Miranda seemed at bit too whiny and I wanted to strangle Alex, I'm happy with the ending of the book.

If this series is new to you, please begin by reading LIFE AS WE KNEW IT followed by THE DEAD & THE GONE. You won't be able to understand the full impact of what these characters are going through in THIS WORLD WE LIVE IN without knowing a little about their backgrounds.

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This is the third and final book in the Last Survivors series by Pfeffer. It wraps things up nicely, but was my least favorite book of the bunch.

This book goes back to Miranda's perspective and is presented as day to day journal entries by her. It has been almost a year since that fateful day when the moon was shoved closer to Earth. Miranda and her family are still surviving. Things get more complicated though when Miranda's father returns with his new wife and their baby, along with two other kids. One of the kids is Alex Morales, whose story we read in the second book. As they struggle to survive, the reader learns that no matter what happens life will continue to limp forward.

This book was a lot less about survival and more about how the characters in the house interacted with each other. For me that just wasn't as interesting as the previous books have been. All of the characters are worn and tired and there is very little that is about hope in this book.

Even Alex and Miranda falling in love, so to speak, was a bit depressing. There was a lot about this that really bothered me. They didn't really seem to like each other all that much, or even have much in common. They were just both there and both around the same age so they were a couple. They quickly went from "I can't stand you" to "I am desperately in love with you" and it didn't make much sense. I guess if you are living from day to day you learn to not be picky about who you are attached to.

A large part of this book revolves around Miranda's family being torn apart and moving on with their lives. Miranda's eldest brother finds a wife, who loves him because he doesn't beat her up like her previous guys have. Miranda's younger brother finds a good friend in Alex's younger sister Julie. Miranda's mom is kind of the one left floundering, which is ironic considering she is the reason they survived so long in the first place. No of the characters are all that admirable, they are just survivors and are at times selfish and hard to deal with.

Much of the survival is similar to what you saw in the first book, the only difference being that with spring around the corner they can be outside more. The book ends fairly open ended as you might expect a book like this too. There are occasional glimpses of hope throughout, but they are rare. Basically if you expect that the characters will be miserable and continue to limp through life, well then that's what happens in this book. They occasionally take solace in each other, but things never really look like they are going to get much better for our families.

Overall an okay read. I enjoyed that it went back to the journal format. The characters are very human, which makes them unlikable at times but realistic. Pfeffer doesn't throw any allusions of hope at the reader; she shows that humans are willing to move on and accept what they have to to survive. Even the love between Miranda and Alex is shadowed by this sentiment; Miranda often calls Alex "last boy on earth" and mentions that it's better than no boy at all. I probably won't be reading future works by Pfeffer; while I enjoyed some of the events leading to the apocalypse and reading about how the characters survived things in general, this was just too depressing of a read for me.

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