The Dead and the Gone (Susan Beth Pfeffer)

The Dead and the Gone
(The Last Survivors series, Book 2)
Susan Beth Pfeffer
Graphia (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: On a Wednesday night in May, as seventeen-year-old Alex Morales workes at a neighborhood pizza joint in New York City, life on Earth changes forever. A massive meteor strikes the moon, altering its orbit and throwing the planet's tides, volcanoes, and climate completely off-kilter. At first, Alex doesn't believe the news. He's spent his entire life trying to be as good as the rich kids at his private Catholic school, determined to someday become the first Puerto Rican-born American president. How could the loving God he prays to take those dreams, his very life, away from him?
When he gets home, he finds it's worse than he thought. His mother was working at the hospital, and his father had flown to a small coastal Puerto Rican town for a family funeral the day before, but the subway line Mami would've taken home has flooded and no planes are flying to bring Papi home - assuming he survived the massive coastal flooding and devastating tsunamis. Neither parent has called, and as days go by and the disasters mount he slowly realizes that they probably never will. Now, Alex has to be the man of the house, with two younger sisters to take care of, in a doomed city with dwindling food supplies and sporadic electricity. But how is he supposed to hold his family together when he feels like he's falling apart himself?

REVIEW: Much like her previous book (Life as We Knew It, reviewed on my site here), Pfeffer paints a grim, stark reality in a horrifically altered world. New York City, which always seemed to Alex as eternal, solid, and reliable as a mountain, quickly erodes away in both a figurative and literal sense. I clipped this book a half-star from a Good rating because it took a while to get the story moving, and because I wasn't that impressed with her protagonist, Alex. He is a devout Catholic and very much old-school about the relative roles of men and women, and early on he even goes so far as to hit one of his sisters for disobedience. (He does express regret for having picked up that trait from his beloved Papi, but it took me a while to forgive him.) Towards the end, the tension ratchets up to a fine pitch, as Alex sees possibilities for survival and escape flash temptingly before his eyes only to vanish even as he reaches for them. By then, I was enjoying the ride, harrowing as it often was. Overall, I'd recommend it and its companion to anyone who wants to read a nice, dark tale of disaster  and raw survival.
I see Pfeffer has a third book out, This World We Live In, where she brings together characters from both stories. I'm not sure if I'll go too far out of my way to read it, but it might make it onto the list someday.