the dead and the gone

Customer Reviews

• An amazing companion novel to LAWKI  May 9, 2008 (18 of 21 found this helpful)

  I had the privilege to get an advanced reading copy and here is my review.
  
  Last year I read Life As We Knew It by the same author of this wonderful book. You can find the review for that book here. I enjoyed Life As We Knew It so much that when I heard about there being a companion book I jumped with joy. Being a companion book also means you don't have to have read Life As We Knew It to know what is going on. The Dead & the Gone is a completely separate story.
  The Dead & the Gone uses the same premise as Life As We Knew It, but takes place in a vastly different environment that creates some truly gruesome challenges for the main characters. Before we were in Pennsylvania away from large bodies of water, away from large cities, and away from practically all the major problems of an urban sprawl. The Dead & the Gone, however, is the exact opposite, taking place in New York City. An asteroid has struck the moon, pushing it into a closer orbit around the Earth and thrusting the Morales family into a grueling struggle for survival. With Alex's parents gone and presumed dead, he has to learn to take care of his younger sisters while keeping his faith in God. But New York City is not an easy place to live in when the electricity rarely works, fuel for stoves is in short supply, and a bitter winter caused by increased volcanic activity thrusts them into extreme cold, famine, and an epidemic.
  Once again I feel that Susan has done a fantastic job bringing forward a truly powerful and realistic story about survival. The only thing SF about this story, again, is the impact on the moon, but the world we're presented is a modern world.
  The strongest element in this companion novel is a religious element. In Life As We Knew It religion wasn't really a big deal, and in some ways it wasn't even part of the story. For The Dead & the Gone religion is practically everything. Alex is a catholic going to a catholic private school in a family of catholics. He's devout, his younger sister Bri is devout, and his youngest sister is religious, though not nearly as much as her siblings. This has to be stressed in my review because this story is partially a test of faith. How does one hold on to a belief in God when everything around you is falling apart and your prayers aren't being answered? When people start committing suicide or dying on the street and nobody bothers to pick them up and tkae them elsewhere for days, weeks, even months, how do you deal with that belief in God? Even though Alex never does lose his faith, he does battle with doubts and feelings that he feels may be sinful. He must do things that he wouldn't normally do and doesn't feel comfortable doing (such as taking the clothes and personal items off dead bodies in the street to barter for food or stealing from abandoned apartments to do the same).
  Alex is a strong character and a character you can't help looking up to. He's charged with taking care of his two sisters practically by himself. Unlike in Life As We Knew It, everything quickly turns to darkness as food becomes incredibly scarce and the bitter winters set in with no way to heat up an apartment that, by default, has no fireplace (I think the quickness of this was somewhat intentional to pull away from the longer feel of the previous book). He has to battle with the decisions he makes every day as he does everything he can just to keep his family alive. It's harsh, it's real, and it's frightening to imagine that anyone would have to go through this. Would any of us survive?
  There are some significant diversions beyond location from the previous book. In The Dead & the Gone we see the main character, Alex, get the flu, and have to follow him through the ordeal since he is the central character and the only character whose mind we get into. Susan does a marvelous job presenting a twisted, delusional view through the eyes of someone stricken with illness. The prose becomes disorienti

• a chilling portrayal of survival   Jul 1, 2008 (8 of 9 found this helpful)

  I read Susan Beth Pfeffer's "The Year Without Michael" quite some time ago, and I remember it being a haunting, if vaguely disturbing story that has no real conclusion. Having read "Life as We Knew It" and its sequel, "The Dead and Gone," I have to say that that seems to be her forte: writing about characters in a slice of time that are dealing with unimaginable events. There's no happy ending to these stories, it's just a brief moment in their lives that show how they cope. In other words, it's a lot like real life.
  
  "The Dead and the Gone" follows 17-year-old Alex in the aftermath of a crazy astronomical event. The moon has been hit by an asteroid that knocks it out of orbit, affecting the tides, the atmosphere, and pretty much the entire environmental balance of the Earth. Alex takes on the responsibility of caring for his two younger teenage sisters while coping with the uncertainty of his parents' fates, food supplies, and the future.
  
  While this could probably be a standalone book, it's more of a compliment to the previous novel set in this future, "Life as We Knew It." Pfeffer assumes you've read the previous book and doesn't set up the moon/asteroid event like she does in the first book. This gives "The Dead and the Gone" a faster-paced feeling, as it starts off with a bang (literally!) and the dramatic events keep unfolding.
  
  The characters in this book are vastly different than the first, which some reviewers don't seem to like. But to me it makes sense - the author is exploring how a worldwide event is affecting people from all walks of life. The "Life as We Knew It" characters aren't especially religious, but Pfeffer chose to sketch a Puerto Rican family that takes faith very seriously in "The Dead and the Gone." Obviously, the world is made up of people from all sorts of backgrounds - so why shouldn't the author take on different types of characters? It might have been interesting if she had chosen to write about characters in another country, instead of basing her two books in the United States. But my overall point is, I think Pfeffer made a great decision in exploring how the same event would affect people with a different worldview.
  
  If you're looking for a happy ending, these are not the books you want to read. They're more character studies in a short period of time, but there is no real conclusion. There's hope at the end, but the story's not really "finished" - kind of like real life.

• Read "Life As We Knew It" first  Jun 20, 2009 (1 of 1 found this helpful)

  Life As We Knew It
  
  I would recommend reading Life As We Knew It first, by the same author. I love both of these books of survival. I recommend it for any age over 12.

• Sequel (of sorts) to Life As We Knew It  Feb 8, 2009 (1 of 1 found this helpful)

  This sequel to Life As We Knew It is set in New York City, where seventeen-year-old Alex Morales lives with his parents and two younger sisters. Unlike Miranda and her family and classmates in the first book, Alex is barely aware of the predicted meteor hit and doesn't even realize what has happened until a day later. Things go from bad to worse almost immediately, however, with thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers dead, rioting in the streets, and social services completely obliterated. When Alex's parents disappear, he is forced to struggle by himself to keep his sisters alive, as food dwindles, sickness spreads, and the worst winter he can remember sets in.
  
  I enjoyed this book, almost as much as Life As We Knew It. Maybe "enjoy" isn't quite the right word, as both books make me want to either hide under the bed or run out to the grocery and stock up on canned goods, but that's because they do such an excellent job of evoking the panic and despair of facing such a disaster. There are a lot of similarities between the two books, except that in Alex's story, the disasters are much more immediate (Although for some reason, Pfeffer chooses not to tell Alex's story in diary format, as she did for Miranda, and that adds a bit of distance). In Life As We Knew It, what was especially striking to me was the sense of smothering isolation as Miranda and her family holed themselves up in their house in the country. We heard about all of the disasters happening, but saw them only as they indirectly affected her family. Being set in NYC, Alex's story of course feels much less isolated, and truly life-threatening situations set in much more quickly. On top of that, Alex's family doesn't have the money or the ability to stockpile food that Miranda's did, and so his world and what he must do to survive is pretty different from Miranda's. The images of people being trampled in food riots and of searching dead bodies on the streets for valuables were especially haunting. Another difference between the two stories is the devout Catholic faith of Alex and his family, which holds strong throughout the book despite a lot of understandable questioning and anger at God. I don't remember religion playing a part at all in Miranda's story, and its inclusion here offers another vision of how people might respond to such difficult times.
  
  Overall, a great book. I hear that Pfeffer is writing a third one set several years after the disaster, which apparently will feature at least some of the characters from the first two books. I can't wait to find out how the world will have changed and what has happened to the two families we've followed so far.

• Live or die... whatevs  Oct 30, 2009 

  I was excited to find out about this companion book to Life As We Knew It, but when I finally sat down to read it I was sorely disappointed. While the idea to show an urban viewpoint of the moon disaster was a good one, the main character, Alex, was so unbelievably stupid, infuriatingly unresourceful, and intensely unlikable that I didn't care if he lived or died. I highly recommend reading LAWKI, but I would skip this one.