Life As We Knew It, Susan Beth Pfeffer

DH travels occasionally, and always buys books in the airport, but his taste is usually...um. He tries, really. But usually we end up tossing the books. (Or maybe that is what is meant to happen? They only sell books you don't want to keep beyond the length of a flight, in case you accidentally leave them on a plane?) Anyway. One book he kept looking at but not getting is the one he finally did buy this last time. And it's a winner.

The premise of Life As We Knew It is thus: an asteroid hits the moon, knocking it closer to the earth, which creates huge tidal waves that destroy large coastline areas, that sucks up volcanoes and creates a mini ice age with all the ash, and that isolates people and cuts off food, water, and electricity. So, not an unheard-of scenario for dystopia. But the thing that made this one different--and much creepier, despite the warmth of the family and friend relationships--was that this doesn't happen in the distant future. It happens right now. And it's really convincing. I don't know about the astrophysics involved, and I did wonder how they got water from their well without electricity, but the rest was so extremely convincing that I wondered what kind of research the author did. I've had to read it in small increments because it's just a little too real for me. Between being a little bit sick, having tornado sirens going off every night, reading about volcanic ash and economic collapses in the news, and still remembering a little too vividly what it was like in the ice storm of 2009 when it was 15 degrees and we had no electricity--and neither did anyone else--well, it's all very close to reality! Especially the bit about spending all day cutting wood and tending the fire and being dirty and not being able to clean clothes and oneself--DH and I recognized so many things we did in that time that I'm thinking Pfeffer MUST have lived through some natural disasters to be so accurate!

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to make sure we have enough canned food to last until we leave. Then maybe I'll look into the two sequels, The Dead and the Gone and This World We Live In.