Friday, July 18, 2025

Last Survivors Series by Susan Beth Pfeffer


Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer.


2016 review: Amazing book about what the world is like after an asteroid pushes the moon slightly closer to the earth. Told through the journal of Miranda, a teenager who is trying to help her family stay together.

2025 review: This was a re-read for me, but I’ve thought of the series so often since I read it in April 2016. When the author recently died, I knew it was time to read it again! I loved this first book so much. It’s wild to me that I originally read it before Covid, and now we’ve been through that and are possibly on the cusp of who knows what in the world… so it was really interesting to re-read it through that lens of what we’ve been through and what’s right around the corner.


The Dead and the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer.


2016 review: Second book in the Life As We Knew It series. Not a bad storyline, but was a bit boring since it was the same time period as the first. A good placeholder to develop some backstory for the third book though.

2025 review: I’d previously read this series so I had vague memories of book two, but it really took me aback on a re-read for it to be a totally different set of characters in a totally different place, but experiencing the same time period. Once I got into it, I appreciated the drastically different interpretation of what happened, and it was well-written in terms of what happened to these characters, but I still think it’s an interesting choice that the writer used the same time period for a second book, even knowing that they’d come together at a later time in the third book. I guess it was easier to write a full second book about the different characters instead of trying to cram all the backstory into the book where he meets Miranda.


This World We Live In by Susan Beth Pfeffer.


2016 review: Really good, satisfying third installment in the Life As We Knew It series. Just as engrossing as the first.

2025 review: I liked how this one brought together the characters from the first two, and while I didn’t care for how religious the second book was, at least it fit the characters. It seemed like everyone was forcibly religious in this book, even though Miranda and her family didn’t seem that way in the first. Not a big deal, maybe just passage of time and the author’s views changing so she put them in the book more? Either way, I think this was a really logical next step for the series.


The Shade of the Moon by Susan Beth Pfeffer.


The funny thing about this book is that I only read it in 2016. Since then, the library has gotten rid of their copy of the book, and once I checked out my review for it, I decided not to buy it myself. I read the sample chapter at the end of the third book and realized it's more about Miranda's little brother, and that Miranda and Alex married (which I remembered, but thought it happened in the third book until I re-read that one), but overall even that sample chapter wasn't intriguing enough to make me re-read the fourth.

2016 review: This book was really slow, and I didn’t feel anything for the characters. Overall it was a pretty satisfying ending to the Life As We Knew It series, as long as it’s the last one. I don’t think much more can be written about this without it being overkill. I kind of wish the series had ended with the third.

Saturday, July 12, 2025

The Final Episode by Lori Roy

The Final Episode by Lori Roy

I found this while searching Kindle Unlimited books to read during my free trial and the synopsis caught my attention. I really loved the writing and the way the story was told. I liked that I was never completely sure if I was “watching” slightly fictionalized episodes of the show or truly living what each episode showed from the characters' POVs as it happened. It doesn’t matter either way, but I thought it was an interesting way to think about what each option might have skewed in terms of the truth.

Spoilers ahead...