Pfeffer, Susan Beth - The Dead and the Gone and This World We Live in

[oyceter]

Respectively second and third in the Last Survivors trilogy (series? It feels unfinished). The Dead and the Gone stands on its own, like Life as We Knew It, but This World We Live in is less standalone.

The Dead and the Gone - This covers the same apocalypse as in the previous book—a meteor (meteorite? I forget the difference) crashes into the moon, knocking it closer to earth, which causes all sorts of natural disasters. However, it's with a completely different set of characters in a completely different place, so the only thing the two have in common is that they cover a similar (or the same?) period of time, from the moon getting hit to approximately a year later.

Alex Morales must take care of his two younger sisters as New York is devastated and he cannot find his parents. There's more infrastructure in place in New York, but of course, things are still bad.

What I remember most about Life as We Knew It is the claustrophobic sense of the world getting smaller and smaller, until it's no bigger than a single room in your house. Here, the world stays a bit larger because it's set in New York City rather than a suburb, but there is the similar sense of worsening conditions, of food growing more and more important, and your circle of loved ones slowly shrinking.

Religion (Christianity) also has a much larger role in this book, or at least from what I can remember; Alex's entire family is very Catholic, and one of his sisters wants to be a nun. There's some examination of faith in the book, particularly with regard to the apocalypse and etc., but it didn't strike me as particularly nuanced or different.

And while I like having POC characters in the center, the gender stuff from book 1 continues in here, with the added downside of it looking like stereotypical macho Latino guy stuff.

This World We Live in - Spoilers for books 1 and 2

Both Miranda and Alex have survived their own individual books, albeit barely, and this book continues Miranda's diary. Her father and stepmother end up making their way back to Miranda's house, and on the way, they join up with Alex and Julie. It was particularly interesting returning to Miranda after having Alex's story; when I first read Alex's, I had thought how much luckier he was to have New York around him, instead of being confined to the suburbs. But when they meet, you realize that Miranda's entire family is still alive, with a bonus baby, while Alex has lost both his parents and his sister.

Unsurprisingly, the two fall in love, although sadly, I thought it more contrived than anything else. Pfeffer might have been commenting on the unlikely pairings that apocalypses bring about, but it felt like we were supposed to believe in it a bit more than I actually did. I was also disturbed by the relentless heterosexualness of all the romantic relationships, the emphasis on babies and reproduction, and even more of the gendered division of labor. Possibly I am a cynic, but the probability of babies surviving the after effects of the apocalypse seem minimal, and I think I would be more depressed than happy to bring a new life into the world like that. And then I have more dislikes that I will put under another spoiler cut!

Spoilers

So not only does Alex lose both his parents and his sister, Julie dies as well. All this while Miranda's entire family stays intact. I was rather bitter by the end of it, because really, Pfeffer couldn't kill off a single one of the Evanses for angst value instead of killing off Alex's second-to-last family member? And sadly, she does this even while writing about how unfair it is that the rich and the powerful get sequestered in safe towns without seeming to realize how it reinforces that only the white people survive.

I am also more and more bugged by the gender roles, from Syl's stories of basically prostituting herself for food to the way the women all end up indoors and the men end up outdoors. I was hoping that in the first book, it was commentary, much like how the rich and powerful got out, but by the third book, I am very doubtful of any social commentary. Like, I could see reasoning being that the same kyriarchy in power ends up widening the power disparity after an apocalypse, ergo all the guards with power being male, but Pfeffer doesn't say much about that.

I was also unsure of what to make of all the religious references. Obviously it's a big deal for Alex, but Miranda seems to have lost faith, and yet there is a great deal of mention of prayer and etc. I'm not actually opposed to that, although I wish we saw more religious diversity, except it felt like the unexamined assumption was that of course people would turn toward religion after an apocalypse. There is some more of Alex and Miranda's crises of faith, but not enough to push it past perfunctory, and too much for what it ends up being.

Although I found the first book gripping, I feel the bits I disliked about it get worse in the next two without giving more story to recompense for it.

Comments

[rachelmanija]

I remember being so boggled by the gender roles in the first book. They are LITERALLY freezing to death, but Miranda can't go out and get wood because... she's a girl? And her totally debilitated brother is more likely to survive than the comparatively fit Miranda because... he's a guy?

I recently read some stuff on the Donner Party, in which way more women survived than men. It's hard to say which factors were most important, but the men were doing a lot of very hard work outside in the cold, because women didn't do that sort of thing at that time. (Sort of. They worked very hard too, but not so much the really backbreaking outdoors-in-the-snow labor.) As a result, the men were more worn out and dropped dead. So if the division of labor is that gendered, the probable result would be... most of the men drop dead. (Women may also be more resistant to cold and starvation, but I believe research on that is inconclusive due to the lack of controlled experiments, for obvious reasons.)

[oyceter]

It is really baffling! I mean, I would understand if they explained it somehow like they want Miranda to survive, so she shouldn't waste energy on stuff like that to save on calories and etc., but ... it's just there. I had the same problem with religion in the books too. I felt like the gender roles and the bits on religion and even race and class were there as unexamined assumptions.