Two Great Book Series for Young Adults

Last night I finished The World We Live In, the third book in the "Moon Trilogy" by Susan Beth Pfeffer.
It was pretty good, but lacked the drama of the first two books of the series, Life As We Knew It, and The Dead and the Gone.  The first two books showed the world slowly, and then more rapidly, deteriorating after an asteroid hit the moon and brought it closer to the Earth.  Life as We Knew It was an easy A+ book, and it really sucked you into the drama of the situation.  The Dead and the Gone, with different characters in a different place going through the same situation, was also very good.  Pfeffer brought the characters that survived both books together in The World We Live In, and it felt really forced.  Also, the addition of all the relationships that were seemingly painful and not meant to be for all the characters seemed like a desperate attempt to drum up some of the Twilight audience.  Still, Pfeffer has created a very interesting new world, and it stayed interesting to see how the characters navigated that world and each other.


An even better series than the "Moon Trilogy" is The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins.  These books are great for all readers, albeit a little violent for some.  In a dystopian future, the country has been divided into labor districts, each of which send two teenage candidates every year to compete in a televised deathmatch known as "The Hunger Games."  The winner is the candidate that doesn't die.  The plot is very much like a cross between The Lottery and Running Man, but Collins does a great job establishing this crazy new world and the characters that inhabit it.  The second book, Catching Fire, starts very slowly compared to The Hunger Games, but once it gets going, it is just as fun and riveting as the first.  The third book, Mockingjay, is releasing today, and already has had very positive reviews.  I am looking forward to reading it very soon!

All six of these books are great reads for students, and I of course advise you to start at the beginning!  Good luck and good reading!