Whew. After I finished this book, I had to just sit and stare at the wall for a while. This was definitely a page-turner and a nail-biter! It’s written as the diary of a girl named Miranda, who leads a completely normal teenage life, complete with all of the usual worries about homework and prom dates, until a meteor hits the moon with a far greater impact than expected, knocking its orbit askew and completely wreaking havoc on life on earth. First there are the disastrous tides caused by the moon’s near proximity, then there are the massive volcano eruptions, which send so much ash into the air that the sun is completely blocked and temperatures plummet.
So yeah, lots of disaster here – but it all pretty much happens off-screen. What we see is a much more intimate portrait of how Miranda and her family deal with all of these end-of-the-world catastrophes as they become increasingly isolated from the world outside their home. I was iffy on this book at first, because I thought the initial plot catalyst was so far-fetched, but in the end I loved it. It’s incredibly tense in a quiet, smothering kind of way, if that makes sense. I love Miranda’s voice – she and her family face problems that would have been unthinkable just months earlier, and she shows a lot of strength and growth, but she’s still just such a TEENAGER that I couldn’t help but love her. The depiction of her family and her relationships with them was wonderful, too. It looks like Pfeffer’s doing a sequel of sorts to this one, too – I’ll definitely have to seek that one out.