Pfeffer skillfully brings the characters from her previous companion novels Life As We Knew It and The Dead and the Gone in this exciting sequel that introduced readers to a world devastated by a major natural disaster. For those of you unfamiliar with the earlier books, they each started with the moon being struck by a comet, knocking it into a lower orbit. The increased gravitational pull between the moon and Earth resulted in major earthquakes, volcanoes, and tidal waves, throwing the planet into something like a nuclear winter (only without the radiation).

In each book, the reader experiences the events through the diary or journal of the protagonist. In Life as We Knew It, that is Miranda, an older teen growing up in rural Pennsylvania. Her house is somewhat secluded, though, it is only a few miles from the center of her small town. The Dead and the Gone presents the same timeline, but only from the perspective of Alex, a Catholic Latino teen growing up in Manhattan.

This novel picks up the story almost a year after the moon shifted in its orbit. Miranda's family is struggling, but surviving with the help of rations supplied by the government and a strong will to live. Things are thrown up in the air when Miranda's father returns home with his new wife and their new born son. They had been refugees who had fled south in the earlier book. Now they have come back, and they are not alone. They have been joined by Alex, his younger sister Julie, and Charlie, a friend of Miranda's father. It is a happy reunion, but one that comes with the extra strain of finding space, food, and other resources for survival.

The larger family works well together, and they find themselves becoming a close-knit extended family ready to face whatever comes their way. Miranda, as well as both of her brothers, start finding romance ... something none of them had expected. Miranda and Alex find themselves becoming closer and closer.

Miranda's mom also finds herself confronted with a need to get over her recently developed agoraphobia.

Besides the incredibly drawn characters, Pfeffer does a wonderful job of presenting the horrors of what Miranda, Alex and their families are facing. Their priorities for what is important have changed as survival is a fight that isn't necessarily going to be won, and they find themselves surrounded by the horrors of natural disasters, starvation, illness, and isolation.

Like the earlier two novels, this is a totally engrossing novel!