Okay, so, I love me a good post-apocalyptic book, and the Dead and The Gone By Susan Beth Pfeffer was a good one. The basic premise of the book and it's companion book Life As We Knew It is that an asteroid smashes into the moon knocking it closer to the earth and thus screwing everything up. Life As We Knew It was about a family that lives in a small Pennsylvania town. The Dead and the Gone(which was way way better) was about three kids living(and dying) in New York City after their parents go missing.
In the third book in the trilogy, the newly released This World We Live In, things are getting a little better for the family in Pennsylvania when the two surviving kids from the Dead and the Gone show up. Shockingly the older girl from the first book and the boy from the second book fall in love within twenty pages. Who could have possibly expected that? Two protagonists falling in love with each other? Totally unheard of!!
Before the Dead and the Gone people arrive the book is a generic disaster survival book and then the Dead and Gone guys arrive and it becomes Twilight.
There are many problems with this book but I have three main ones. The first and most important is the way the book treats Alex, the main character of the Dead and The Gone. In the Dead and the Gone he is a heroic character who looks out for his two younger sisters in a terrible situation. In this book he is a suborn, fanatically christian, overly romantic, moron. He consistently tries to leave the small town in Pennsylvania where he and his sister are happy and relatively safe to got to a monastery for really no reason whatsoever.
My second problem is the way the various romances that occur in the book are portrayed. They all happen basically overnight, one literally does happen overnight. Early in the book the brothers of the girl from Pennsylvania go to the river to fish and one of the brothers meets a woman who is being beaten up by a guy(what that was all about is never explained) and the brother tells the guy to stop hitting her and then he(the brother) marries her the next day. Okay, yeah. So that gives you a little taste of what was wrong with this book.
My third problem is the ending. I don't want to ruin it for you, but I will if you don't stop reading now.
Still Reading? I will ruin it?
Will you stop reading already?! God almighty!!
Okay here is what happens in the end, the protagonists decided to go away to a "safe town" where there are still hospitals and schools and such with some of the family members, leaving the rest behind for no real reason. Then a tornado hits the town. Killing one of the group and paralyzing the sister. The female protagonist kills her to put her out of her misery. And then she writes(did I mention that the book is told through her diaries? Well they are.) that the world is bad, her life is bad, in the end everyone is going to die, there is really no hope, so she's going to go hang out with Alex. And they all lived happily ever.
But it's all okay because she learned life lessons from those who have died.
I do not recommend this, but I do recommend the Dead and the Gone.
2/5
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
So I've looked around at the blogs and reviews and I don't think the library gave me the right book. Everyone else seems to love it. I think I got some sort of Fan fiction. I now look forward to reading the real book, which is apparently very good. I also hope that the con man who sold the library hundreds of fake copies is arrested.
...ha ha!
Be careful saying stuff like that sarcastically rock4every, I once said the exact same thing, and it turned out that there really was a con-man!
I think rock 4 ever is right. This book was simple bad. I have a good analogue for it:
Its a lot like being tied down and having someone methodically rub your lower back with sand-paper. It starts out boring and uncomfortable, it's not too bad... but as the paper grinds, back and forth, back and forth, your outer skin layer is pealed off, exposing the nerve's inside. the pain increases, but you boldly press on. then the blood starts to flow. you feel your body weaken, and the pain only increases. you don't think you can go on. the paper has worn though all your protection, and still shows no sign of stopping. but if you can make it though you get the most wonderful reward in the world.. the ability to convince others the suffer the same torture!
So every one it is well worth it! Read the book its wonderfully terrible!!
Post a Comment