The Dead And The Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Being a Puerto Rican in New York before the disaster was hard enough, but now with the moon knocked closer to the Earth by an asteroid, every thing's out of control. It's especially bad since Alex's dad was down in Puerto Rico during the tsunamis and he was almost definitely drowned, and Alex and his sisters haven't heard from their mother since the day the hospital called in all the emergency personnel. Alex knows how to cope though and he thinks he's going to be all right. He just needs to find enough food and keep his two sisters safe. Sadly though, things don't turn out to be that easy. With winter coming early and New York being constantly washed away by the tides, food and shelter are becoming harder and harder to come by and the dead bodies are piling up every day. Will Alex be able to provide for himself and his family long enough for them to find a way out of the city?

I had enormously high expectations coming into this book because I absolutely loved the first book, Life As We Knew It. And for the most part, all my expectations were met. The only itsy bitsy complaint that I have was that this book was a little be harder to get into than LAWKI. Thankfully that didn't last long and I was able to get completely swept away once I got a little farther in. Other than that, D&G was just as good as LAWKI in every way. Susan Beth Pfeffer really knows how to tell a story. She was able to make it so that two books, telling the story of the same situation, were able to be unique and completely different than each other so that nothing felt repetitive or boring. LAWKI was set in the country so things were bound to be different in this book and they were. I never thought that the author would be able to make the stories so separate but she pulled through and I was so happy about that. I got to read two equally amazing books and see one chilling and scary story from two perspectives which was really great. I also liked how, as in LAWKI, the characters had a ton of depth and they were all planned out extremely well. Another thing I liked was that in this book, we got to see things from a religious standpoint. In LAWKI, the religious people kind of get bashed and I was really glad to see that the author could look at both sides of a situation and see it from everyone's shoes. So all in all, I would highly recommend The Dead and The Gone as a chilling, spooky, and extremely addicting read.