I enjoyed it up to the end. I found the narrative structure with its ever-narrowing focus to be, for the most part, well done – it made it all the more claustrophobic at the end – but I hated the ending. They are all about to starve to death and… a snowmobile full of food appears. The end. It made no sense. It didn’t feel like an ending at all. It was as bad as the end of WMBH. I agree with Megan that it’s similar to “Long Winter” in many ways, only “Long Winter” was a much better book (and the food delivery in LW was based on an actual event.) I also saw the parallels to “Anne Frank.”

I’m not even Christian and I was offended by the portrayal of the church. I wonder if by having a particularly psychotic church in place, the author got around any possibility of having an organized community center that would get the family out of the house and involved with other people. She clearly wanted to write a “trapped on a desert island” story, and a functional community of any kind would have undermined that.

I always wonder how people go on. In high school I read a short story about a boy whose whole family died of the flu (I’ve been trying to remember what it was and the internet isn’t helping…is it in Winesburg, Ohio? Anyway.)

There’s a guy who works the front desk of one of our community centers whose forearm was cut off with a machete and lost most of his extended family in a massacre; there are a lot of Somali and Hmong people here who grew up in wars and refugee camps. I have a friend whose parents were Holocaust survivors and raised her to stick with almost the kind of confines Miranda’s mother puts on her.

I look at how hard individual losses have hit me, and can’t even imagine how people pick up and start over, much less make anything resembling good decisions.

I always wonder how people go on. In high school I read a short story about a boy whose whole family died of the flu (I’ve been trying to remember what it was and the internet isn’t helping…is it in Winesburg, Ohio? Anyway.)

There’s a guy who works the front desk of one of our community centers whose forearm was cut off with a machete and lost most of his extended family in a massacre; there are a lot of Somali and Hmong people here who grew up in wars and refugee camps. I have a friend whose parents were Holocaust survivors and raised her to stick with almost the kind of confines Miranda’s mother puts on her.

When I worked food service, we had a Vietnam vet who had been homeless for decades who came into the deli for ice & water every day, and our manager was always trying to get us to kick him out. Now I run into guys back from Iraq all the time on the bus that goes out to the VA, trying to keep it together and get rehabilitation therapy and a job, worrying about the people they know still over there.

I look at how hard individual losses have hit me, and can’t even imagine how people pick up and go on, much less make anything resembling good decisions.

I think one of the advantages to literature in almost any genre is that it gives us a chance to second guess, be it, would I buy grits or bean or both? or would I have listen to Friar Lawrence?
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MEA

What mother (or father) doesn’t panic at the thought of not being able to feed their children? What teenager (which, after all, this book was written for) wouldn’t be shell-shocked in this situation? I thought Miranda was heroic, in probablly the only way possible under these circumstances.

Self-reliance and sustainable living has nearly been bred out of us – who among us, young or old, would be prepared for a disaster like this? (Well, not among us, maybe, but most folks)

If this book makes young people stop and think about life without Ipods, without gasoline, without electricity and ultimately without food, then I think it has done a service.

I thought that the Mom was unnaturally savvy and wealthy to make the preparations and decisions she did, and that gave them an obvious advantage. I also questioned making Jonny the chosen one to survive. Really, I would have chosen either Matt or Miranda. Especially Matt. If only one of them had to survive, Matt or Miranda would have been much better equipped developmentally to emigrate. A 19- or 16-year-old can fend for themselves much better than a 13-year-old.

After I read it, I handed it to my 12-year-old daughter. She enjoyed reading it, and I used it to try to explain why we are making some of the preparations that we are. I thought it was a very useful book for introducing the disasters we face.

One more thing about the shopping scene: don’t laugh, but when I was a teenager I had this recurring dream where TEOTWAWKI occured and I was one of the few survivors. After I made sure I was safe and everything I inevitably went and robbed the mall. That dream is probably the only time I ever acted like a typical teenager.

I liked this book. Really. Besides the fact that it took me not quite a day and a half to finish it (I ate it up) it makes no claims about how people should handle disaster. At least there were no overtly obnoxious “see how cool I am, I know how to make beef jerky, don’t you feel lame” kind of statements.

I mean, yes, the mom panicked and hoarded and they should have shared with the neighbors. Definitely. But I really liked the narrow focus of the book. No talk about rebuilding civilization, short of a kind of guilty admission that the kids weren’t doing their homeschool reading when they were supposed to. A very detailed description about food, and who ate what, and how it made them feel, and all the guilt issues surrounding eating, not eating, providing, hoarding, preparing food. A very detailed look at what slow starvation looks like. The fact that the older brother probably did permanent damage to his heart when he was sick and helped the girl move the two others to the other room…

That particular detail was really interesting to me. I mean, when was the last time we’ve had to think about the damage that malnutrition does to our bodies? Never. We all know people who don’t eat well, but it’s usually more of a function of overeating of a specific kind of bad food than an actual caloric lack. But it’s one of those areas of information that, really, we should all probably get more educated about. I mean, basic nutrition is essential. But how do we assess risk and decide what is safe, when even the essentials aren’t available? Harm reduction strategies would be good to know more about. I might have to go look into those books on famine (thanks for the pointers, whoever it was who mentioned them on that other comments thread).

I don’t know. I think the book’s ethics may have been questionable, but it was an interesting look at what might happen if things just actually collapsed all of a sudden. Some people’s first instinct probably WOULD be to hoard green beans. They would just think, green beans are healthy, right? Isn’t that the kind of thing you should hoard? If you’re a mom, and want to feed your kids healthy food?

Also, maybe all the flour and cornmeal and grits had already been hoarded by the middle-aged men who had read Lucifer’s Hammer 30 years ago, so the only thing left was green beans.

I really liked the encounter with the figure skating pro kid/crush out on the ice, and how the main character kind of dismisses it later. In terms of the plot, it was an exorcism of her previous adolescent silliness, but the author treated the whole scene with just enough respect that it wasn’t silly, and when the girl dismisses the whole thing later and says it was probably just a hallucination, the reader isn’t totally convinced. You feel like, even if it was a hallucination, it was an essential little moment, when the emotional loose ends got tied up so the character could keep going, with her load a little lighter.

It’s silly that I enjoyed that so much, it’s probably just the adolescent girl inside the grown-up me, hoping that girls who are adolescents now will get those little indulgent, romantic moments that help them bridge the difference between the world as they thought it would be and the world that gets handed to them. I mean, damn, it was hard enough to be 16 back when I was. I hope today’s 16-year-olds catch a break once in a while and are able to use all of their crazy, flexible, over-emotional minds to deal with what’s coming.