For some reason, Harcourt has started sending me ARCs at work. I'm not complaining, especially when one of them is a companion to a book I really enjoyed. 
 The Dead and the Gone picks up right after the moon has been knocked closer to Earth, so we lose the preparation we had in Life as We Knew It. Alex and his two younger sisters sit home, waiting for their dad to return from Puerto Rico and their mom to get home from work. And they wait. And wait. 
 The story isn't radically different from Miranda's--food supplies are scarce, government-sponsored handouts are dwindling, families are leaving for greener pastures down south. What's different is that Alex is 17 and responsible for his sisters, and there is no one else for them to lean on. Where Miranda railed against the unfairness of it--she couldn't go skating, or see her friends!--Alex is struggling to keep his sisters warm and fed, and has to take on responsibilities that his college-bound mind had never entertained. For a young man who has worked to the top of his class, that he resorts to looting corpses in the street for anything he can trade is a huge, crushing fall--but he does it anyway. 
 I'm hopeful that this isn't the beginning of a series of books on "what's happening in _________". It's enough to see the contrast between rural Pennsylvania and New York City. The Dead and the Gone would be a little hard to follow without having read its predecessor, given that the story immediately gets underway without addressing the catastrophe (other than a brief "that happened"), but it's interesting to see the other side of survival--the families that are just hanging on, rather than the ones that are passing the time.