The fourth book in the Life as We Knew It series focuses on Jon, younger brother to Miranda and friend of Julie from the previous titles. It's four years since a meteor crashed into the moon, killing billions and changing everything. Now that things have somewhat settled down, the remains of society are stratifying. Jon is in Sexton with his stepmother and baby half-brother; because of the passes they possess, life is better. Jon's mother, Miranda, and her husband, Alex, live nearby as grubs, the worker bees whose endlessly long days of bitterly hard labor sustain the surrounding areas. And Julie? She's dead. In fact, it's her pass that has allowed Jon to live in Sexton, but thanks to events surrounding her death, his privileges engender considerable guilt. Then Jon learns exactly how Julie died, and everything is turned upside down once more. The pampered and weak Jon is not a particularly likable character, but in some ways that intensifies the story, as the moral choices he makes become successively more complicated. Pfeffer's well-written take on what life might be as it returns to "normal" is sometimes brutal and always depressingly real.

Four years ago, a meteor crashed into the moon, altering the Earth's gravity; the world is an ever-bleaker place in this fourth of Pfeffer's gripping series. Seventeen-year-old Jon Evans, the younger brother of Miranda, protagonist in two of the earlier novels, lives with his stepmother and half brother in an enclave called Sexton. After countless natural disasters and proliferating disease, humanity is now plagued by rigidly cruel class stratification, in which a person is either a respected "claver" or a disdained "grub," a system so ingrained that Jon struggles to understand whether or not he thinks it is right. Featuring a plot that delivers twist after twist, this is a vivid take on the man-as-monster theme common to the genre. While the individual relationships depicted at times stray into melodrama, there is a persistent undercurrent of dread running throughout due to the novel's realistic portrayals of mob violence and bigotry. Short, dated excerpts from Jon's third-person perspective lack the immediacy of the epistolary style employed in the installments narrated by Miranda, but they do a fine job of illustrating a young man in a moral quandary. Action-packed and completely unpredictable, this latest will be widely anticipated by the series' many fans. (Post-apocalyptic adventure. 14 & up)

In a well-protected enclave, Jon is shielded from the worst environmental effects that resulted when the moon was knocked out of place a few years (and three Life As We Knew It books) ago. Pfeffer does justice to each recurring complex character, though a lack of satisfactory explanation for the existing power dynamics mar this intriguing revisit to the world gone permanently awry.