This book is depressing. Or, as the author likes to say on her blog, it is 150% filled with bleakity bleak. There is bleak, and then there is bleak. This book is the latter. The ending even had me going, “wow, that is DEPRESSING.” (And I think the ending is supposed to be HAPPY.)

Do not read to be happy. In fact, do not read anywhere when you’re already feeling low, feeling extra cheerful, or anytime near a full moon. Any other time is (mostly) fine. However, there’s no escaping being depressed.

The story starts off normally, with the big event of an asteroid hitting the moon. It’s trotted out to the masses as a one-in-a-lifetime spectacle. Miranda, who narrates the story through diary entries, is interested but more bothered by the fact that all her teachers are using it to assign extra homework. Then the asteroid hits, and the moon’s orbit is shifted. This changes the entire make-up of the Earth as the altered orbit throws wrenches into normal weather patterns, changes the tides, and other nasty phenomenon. Through it all, Miranda’s family has to survive and adjust to the way the world is now.

In other words, it was Day After Tomorrow in YA form, and without Jake Gyllenhaal. But if they wanted to cast him as Matt in the movie version of this book (this would be awesome) I am all for it.

Come on, Hollywood, it would be so good for me everyone.

I love post-apocalyptic scenarios, and this concept was really new to me. The asteroid/comet thing has been done before, but this was a really nice breath of fresh air (so to speak). The moon is just there; we don’t really think about how it impacts our lives. So someone wants to mess with it! I SAY THUMBS UP.

I loved this book. I’m not overly crazy about diary-style narratives, but this worked for me. I liked Miranda and Matt nd Jonny, although I was never very sure about Miranda’s mother. She was smart and resourceful but she (in so many ways) was also a detriment. She was too focused on keeping things normal when they would never be normal again — Miranda seems the last to know about things, caught in a place where she’s not as young as Jonny, who stays protected until the end, but not as old as Matt, who becomes the family’s chief reason for survival. Chop, chop.

(But why couldn’t Miranda chop wood, too? Question mark!)

I want to say this is a character novel, too. Miranda has to deal with a lot of crap — just filtered through the end of her world. Nothing can ever be normal for her again. Boyfriends and loyalty to family and in a weird sense, going out into the world — her town. Because her house and her property become so much of her world, and anything farther away is dangerous. Most teens have to leave their hometown to really feel a sense of danger, but Miranda gets it just walking down the street. It reverses the process of a teen’s world getting bigger as they age. Miranda’s world becomes focused on a room filled with family and a wood stove. Also, I wondered about a character Miranda meets — wondered about it because Miranda was already so hungry. Curious as to how reliable she was at that point in the story. I want thoughts on this point from someone else.

There were a lot of elements of this novel that creeped me out. Parents selling their kids off to strangers so they would survive— turning a blind eye that it probably means an older man is going to be soliciting sex for helping that kid survive. The inevitable evangelical Christian movement—Becky freaked me the fuck out, every time she was on the page I felt crawly. Her pastor (we meet him eventually) only drove the fact home. All these ugly things, sex and suicide and starvation — Miranda only sees bits of them, but her community seems pretty insular. What she sees makes you imagine even worse outside her point of view.

And her mother. I really don’t know how to feel about the mother by the end of the novel. I really, really don’t.

The ending? Is it as bleak as it seems? I wonder. I still felt depressed when I finished. Also, this book is on the fast track for my deus ex machina award for the last few scenes. All we know is that Miranda’s family might survive; no clue about what might happen to her father or his other family. So many of the side characters we meet — I wonder what sort of ending would have managed to uplift me.

I still love it, though. Dear Hollywood: movie plz.

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