See You At Harry's

Fern's family drives her crazy.  Her dad has a new plan to advertise his restaurant that involves using the whole family and he doesn't understand how this will ruin Fern's life. Her mother spends a lot of time meditating to find her inner peace.  Her sister is taking a year off between high school and college and is supposed to be helping at the restaurant, but is mostly looking to get out of doing any work.  Her older brother is in the closet and is having trouble both at home and at school as a result.  And Fern's younger brother Charlie is little and cute and seems to get away with everything, and no one else seems to see how annoying he is.  Fern loves her family, but with so much going on she often feels alone.  But when tragedy rocks the whole family's world, Fern feels more alone than ever as she wrestles with her grief and guilt. 

There isn't a way to talk about Jo Knowles' See You at Harry's without making it sound incredibly sad and tragic.  And I'll be honest - it's a heart-wrenching tear-jerker at times.  But what impresses me most about this novel are the more positive aspects.  Knowles does an amazing job of creating a realistic, nuanced portrait of a family.  The members of Fern's family all love each other, but they don't always get along perfectly.  The characters are what make this story powerful instead of saccharine, and it's great to see how the family comes together when they really need to.  This book is a bit of a page-turner and most readers will be able to get through it fairly quickly, but it is worth lingering a bit with these characters.

Overall Grade:  A-

Life As We Knew It

A major astronomical feat is about to take place:  A meteor will hit the moon.  At first, all 16-year-old Miranda thinks is that this event is giving her teachers an excuse to assign more homework.  But when it turns out that the asteroid is much denser than predicted, the impact actually knocks the moon out of its orbit and pushes it closer to the Earth.  As a result the Earth's climate changes drastically.  Tsunamis destroy coastlines around the world.  Volcanoes hidden beneath the Earth's surface erupt and ash clouds the sky.  Disease spreads quickly.  Crops are destroyed and food becomes scarce.  Electricity and heat become almost completely unavailable.  Suddenly homework is the last thing on Miranda's mind and she and her family struggle to survive in rural Pennsylvania. 

Told through Miranda's diary entries, Susan Pfeffer's Life As We Knew It is actually sometimes hard to read.  Not because the writing is poor - it's not - but because it becomes so easy to imagine that this disaster could really happen to us.  I personally found myself looking at the moon strangely and wondering if I had enough canned food in the house after I finished reading it.  The diary format works very well in this book because it allows readers to focus on Miranda's emotional response to the disaster rather than dwelling on the scientific whys.  Readers only know as much about what's happening in the rest of the world as Miranda does, and that honestly isn't much.  But this format makes it easy to get inside Miranda's head and connect with her situation on a personal level.

I read this book recently for a second time as it was this month's selection for my teen book club. It's just as powerful of a read the second time around!

Overall Grade:  A-

If you enjoyed Miranda's story there are two sequels to this book.  In The Dead and the Gone we learn about this same disaster from the perspective of a boy in New York City.  The conclusion to this trilogy, This World We Live In, brings Miranda's and Alex's stories together.