Review: Life as we Knew it, by Susan Pfeffer

Our world ends tonight...

Sixteen year old Miranda isn't that interested in the meteor that's supposed to hit the moon. She has other things to worry about – her father's new wife's pregnancy, for one, and her best friend's worrying new found religion, for another. The whole meteor thing is just an excuse for more homework, as far as she can tell.

She's wrong.

The meteor knocks the moon closer to the earth. Immediate reports of tidal waves start coming in from around the globe, and that's just the beginning. Earthquakes and volcanoes quickly follow. Miranda and her family are in for the struggle of their lives...

First of all; this is the first of a series, but it stands on its' own — no cliffhanger. Except of course that you'll be desperate to find out what happens next, to Miranda and her brothers and mother.

Now that that's out of the way...

The book's written as Miranda's journal, in present tense, which ratchets up the tension as there's no hint of what's going to happen next until it happens. It also makes it much easier to get inside Miranda's head, to the point that you almost feel what she's feeling...it's a shock, sometimes, to look up from Miranda describing scraping snow off the roof and realise that the sun's shining out here in the real world.

Miranda's world gets smaller in stages; no Internet or phones or TV, no school, no trips to town, no holiday away, and finally no room to be alone. But as her world gets smaller, her ability to see joy in the tiniest things gets larger; a dinner with friends, a piece of chocolate, a joke with her brothers or a conversation with her mother.

A lot of readers have said that this book made them go out and stock up on tinned food and batteries. I'd have done the same if I thought I had any chance of surviving a catastrophe like this one. {I haven't. That's why I like to read about them.} Miranda not only survives, she grows and learns from the experience, and she's much more than a year older at the end of the book, March 20th. {The years are cunningly not mentioned. This worries me a little, but we're past May 18th for this year, anyway.}

One of the best in the post apocalyptic genre, and a welcome respite from vampires.



We are a family. We love each other. We've been scared together and brave together. If this is how it ends, so be it.
Only, please, don't let me be the last one to die.

Customer Review: Knife, by RJ Anderson

Knife by RJ ANDERSON



I'll admit it, I'm a Librarian's daughter and I always judge a book by it's cover, so when I saw the fairy floating on the front of Knife, I wasn't that interested. But I picked it up and read the back and thought I'd spend on the chance of getting a few nights out of it. I'll cop to being wrong this time on prejudging it but I'll still do it, and anyone tries to stop me - I'll set my parents on you - they're Librarians, so they can take you...

So Knife is not really a fairy story although it does have fairies, and it isn't really a love story although it does have romance and it isn't really a fantasy story although it does have magic and it isn't really an adventure story although it does have epic quests and fights and good versus evil. As is the nature of stories of this kind that take in so many genres, it has something for you no matter what kind of book you like. If you like love stories, then that's the kind of story you will read in this book, if you like magic then the story will be about that, if you like adventure then the journeys and travel and quest aspect will be your thing.

For me the best part was how much I enjoyed this book that I picked up out of boredom and how suprised I was to accidentally find such an excellent read by pure chance. See magic and fate lovers, perhaps I was meant to.

The book took in love and unrequited love, I mean, she's a fairy, he's a boy and a crippled boy at that which brings it's own challenges and one of my favourite parts was how love did conquer all, he didn't have to be healed for them to maybe end up together, she did have to change but fundamentally as opposed to personally. Love can conquer but it didn't change them, not the people or fairy that they were at least. It has action, and speeding cars, and attempted suicide and imprisonment and tantrums and secrets and lies and all the while a really, really strong story to push you to the next page and then the next. I would highly recommend this to anyone, I've recommended it to older and younger friends and all have enjoyed it. I won't say if you love Twilight or Harry Potter or Skullduggery Pleasant read this because I could as easily say if you like Nora Roberts or Jodi Picoult or Nicholas Sparks, read this. I will say if you like those books, try this as it has elements of all of them..

The best news, you don't have to wait like I did as RJ Anderson has already published a sequel so "Rebel" is only waiting to be picked up next. The third one? Well sorry, it is coming and there is only so much a non-magic human can do....

Maeve works for the local County Council.

Review: Viola in Reel Life, by Adrainna Trigiani

Viola is a fourteen year old native New Yorker. She's used to following her documentary producing parents all over the world. But when they sign up for an assignment in Afganistan, they decide it's too dangerous for her and enroll her in an all girl boarding school in Indiana. Viola's determined to hate every minute of it. But it's hard to hate girls who seem to understand you so well, or the boys at the neighbouring academy...or the chance to create her very first movie...

Viola walks the fine line between being whiny - there are a couple of times you want to shake her, but they pass quickly - and being too squeaky clean to be believable. Any teenage girl in her place has a right to a little self pity, but she does shake herself out of it when she learns that her interests can apply and that she can contribute to this community. Of course, the boys at the neighbouring school help with that, as does the film competition that draws all her new friends together.

It's not a perfectly happy ending, but it is realistic, and you feel that Viola has learned and grown...which is, after all, the point of boarding school.


'When I go up for a part, sometimes I'm too tall or too thin, or too this or too that, or not enough or way, way too much. The goddamned theater! You can't please them! I have to live with being judged on everything from the credits on my résumé to the size of my ankles! But you - you are not judged, and you are not dismissed. You are the first thought in your mother's and father's mind in the morning and their last one before sleep.'

'Did they tell you that?'

'No. But I'm a mother. And that's just how it goes.'

Children's top sellers and new titles...week ending May 9

Hi all.

Percy Jackson is still selling well, especially the most recent title, Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian. Rick Riordan's new series, The Kane Chronicles, started well this week with The Red Pyramid. Where Percy Jackson was all about modern day Greek gods, Kane is about ancient Eygptian gods set loose in our time.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is going strong.

Threads: Beads, Boys and Bangles, the follow up to last year's Threads was released this week. This year Crow and her friends have an ethical dilemma when reports that Crow's clothes are sweat shop products come to their attention.

The third in the Last Survivors series, This World we Live In, has been released. Miranda's world is about to get a lot larger when she meets, quite literally, the last boy in the world...

Review: Nation, by Terry Prachett

When much is taken, something is returned...

Mau is not a man. Not yet. But his manhood test is almost over, and soon he'll return home.

But on his way home he is caught up in a tsunami, and when he reaches his island Nation he finds that his people have been washed away. He is alone...apart from the ghost girl, and, after a while, the refugees. And over the horizon, the war canoes of the cannibal Raiders are drawing ever closer...

Nation is a very hard book to categorise. It's a coming of age story, it's a survival story, it's a horror and a comedy and a drama. All of these things are true. But it's also a beautiful way of looking at a world so very close to our own. Mau and Daphne, the point of view characters, must learn to change the way they think to deal with their circumstances. And you will find your thinking changing along with theirs. If this book doesn't stay with you after you've read it, I'll be very surprised.

It's also a remarkably hard book to describe, because anyone hearing 'Well, it starts with a tsunami that kills everyone...' immediately puts it back down again. But this is not a book about death; it's about life, and belief, and about how your world can start again even after everything that gave it shape is gone.


"There was a boy called Mau. I see him in my memory, so proud of himself because he was going to be a man. He cried for his family and turned the tears into rage. And if he could, he would say 'Did not happen!' and the wave would roll backwards, and never have been. But there is another boy, and he is called Mau too, and his head is on fire with new things. What does he say? He was born in the wave, and he knows that the world is round, and he met a ghost girl who is sorry she shot at him. He called himself the little blue hermit crab, scuttling across the sand in search of a new shell, but now he looks at the sky and knows that no shell will ever be big enough, ever. Would you ask him not to be? Any answer will be the wrong one. All I can be is who I am. But sometimes I hear the boy inside cry for his family."

"Does he cry now?"

"Every day. But very softly. You won't hear him..."