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Susan Beth Pfeffer: This World We Live In (Hardcover, 2010, Harcourt) 4 stars

When the moon's gravitational pull increases, causing massive natural disasters on earth, Miranda and her …

Review of 'This World We Live In' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I really enjoyed the first two books in this series, but this third one... it seemed to be more of a juvenile teen romance than an awesome story about a family surviving on an earth with a displaced moon.

Written as diary entries a year after the events in the first novel, this story continues that of Miranda, and brings Alex and Julie from the second novel into the story too. I found this a little disappointing because yes, we skipped entirely over Alex & Julie's trek to see Carlos, their time with Miranda's father and his family and their journey with Miranda's father back to their house. They just arrived at Miranda's house one day and there they are in the story.

The diary entries themselves were very shallow, and didn't tell us a lot about what was going on other than Miranda was "in love" with this boy she just met and that everyone else was really whiny. I am not even exaggerating with that statement. Everyone had something to whine about, or throw tantrums over and it was over stupid things that people should have been more mature about. Even Miranda had her moments. It felt like she was less mature in this novel than she was in the first one.

There were other things that annoyed me a little too. One example is that after an entire year of semi starvation, they only just now decided to go loot houses for supplies and even then, the mother was reluctant. It almost read like 'Yes, my children are starving but that is OK because we didn't resort to stealing food from empty houses or anything.' Sigh.

I feel like all the things that made the first two novels great were missing from this one and sadly, I think this will be the last foray into this series for me. I see the author has a fourth novel but I think I will probably give it a miss.