The Dead and Gone.

"Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Life as We Knew It enthralled and devastated readers with its brutal but hopeful look at an apocalyptic event--an asteroid hitting the moon, setting off a tailspin of horrific climate changes. Now this harrowing companion novel examines the same events as they unfold in New York City, revealed through the eyes of seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican Alex Morales. When Alex's parents disappear in the aftermath of tidal waves, he must care for his two younger sisters, even as Manhattan becomes a deadly wasteland, and food and aid dwindle.
     With haunting themes of family, faith, personal change, and courage, this powerful new novel explores how a young man takes on unimaginable responsibilities."-GoodReads.

  I'm definitely thinking this is one of my more favorite series. I read "Life As We Knew It" earlier this summer which was right after I had lived through my first real winter. Being a native-Texan who has never really had "winter", the Tennessee cold was a bit of a shock. So pretty much during my time reading the first Last Survivors book I just kept thinking about how cold I had been and how I would have dealt with that kind of cold weather outside AND inside for months and months. This book made that even more intense.

In the first one the mother was a take action kind of person. She knew they were going to need supplies and did what she had to to get what they were going to need. She remembered tons of stuff that helped them survive. 

In book #2, Alex is only 17 and didn't keep up with the news reports on the moon so he didn't know how serious it was. Him and his younger sisters stay in their crappy apartment building that his dad works in waiting for their parents return (father went to Puerto Rico for a funeral and mother got called in to the hospital she worked in) which he thinks will happen really soon and that what they have will last them long enough. Pretty soon though days turn into weeks and weeks into months and he still hasn't made preparations for the early winter, so he ends up having to do some pretty crazy stuff to keep a little food in their bellies.

The first Last Survivors was written in diary form from the girls point-of-view and that worked well for that story. This one is written similarly, with the dates being written in to keep track of the days, but it is not Alex telling the story. This works though since he did not seem like the kind of kid that would keep a journal or would have time to keep up with it, so I liked it this way. 

What I found to be a little strange about the story was that Alex kept saying he wanted to be the first Puerto Rican president but he did not know very much about the current events. If he didn't have the nuns, priests, and one friend telling him what was happening in the world he would have never known. I would have thought that someone that wanted to be president would be more up to-date on stuff like that.

All in all though this was a good story. It showed a different side of the world wide tragedy and very different people. Can't wait to read "This World We Live In" to see how the two stories are entwined!

4/5