The Dead & the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer

When life as Alex Morales had known it changed forever, he was working behind the counter at Joey's Pizza. He was worried about getting elected senior class president and making the grades to land him in a good college. He never expected that an asteroid would hit the moon, knocking it closed in orbit to the earth catastrophically altering the earth's climate.

He never expected to be fighting just to stay alive.

This harrowing companion novel to Life As We Knew It examines the same events in Life As We Knew It as they unfold in New Your City, revealed through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican New Yorker When Alex's parents disappear in the aftermath of tidal waves and tsunami's, he must care for his to younger sisters, Briana, 15, and Julie, 13, even as Manhattan becomes a deadly wasteland.

With haunting themes of family, faith, personal change, and courage, this powerful novel explores how a young man takes on unimaginable responsibilities to keep the rest of his family alive while they are faced with terrible obsticles.

I absolutely loved Life As We Knew It and had high hopes for The Dead & The Gone. I was blown away with this book. It was impeccable. I couldn't of imagined a better companion novel to Life As We Knew It. This novel, I think, was a lot darker and more intense then the first book. There was a lot more death and hardships in this book then the other. But I felt that LAWKI had more emotional problems.

Alex was a great main character for this book. He was that warm, strong, and sensitive mind that the book needed. I also really enjoyed Alex's sisters. They had such different personalities, all three of them, and I thought those characters were good together.

The end wasn't satisfactory for me, though. It was sad and not enjoyable, but, I guess, it makes sense how Pfeffer ended the book. It was a few months shy of when the end of Life As We Knew It ended, which was strange while reading it when I looked ahead a little bit, but I can see why. Anyhow, the writing was pretty good, the only thing I didn't like was that it was in third person. If I remember correctly, Life As We Knew It, wasn't in third person. But that just might be me being picky again. Overall, it's an emotional and very deep book, but a must-read. I loved it and I think Pfeffer is writing another companion to these books and I cannot wait. You don't need to read Life As We Knew It to read The Dead & The Gone, just so you know. But I would pick these books up at your local library/bookstore as soon as possible.

~Kelsey