Wow!

Okay.  So I blew right through The Shade of the Moon.  I am very sad that it is over.  This book was just exceptional!  First off, I love the cover.  The building on it makes me think of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum and I have to say that a lot of the people left over in the world since an asteroid hit the moon and knocked it all over the place need serious psychiatric help, so I guess that is fitting!  With my Presbyterian upbringing, I believe that human nature is basically evil and so it is no surprise to me that the society pieced back together after this natural disaster is full of corruption and prejudice and hate.  (You know the old joke I have mentioned before:  What is the Presbyterian answer to why do bad things happen to good people?  There are no good people.)  When people are scared there is a good chance that they will fall prey to massive wickedness and man, that's what has happened.  It all began in Life as We Knew It, which I read before I started this blog.  And it still reminds me of this song.  The second book, The Dead and the Gone, was just as great, set in NYC and told from a guy's POV and so it was totally different, but equally awesome.  Then there was This World We Live In, which brought the characters from the first and the second books together and was incredible!!!!  I thought that was the last one, but no!  Then The Shade of the Moon came out and man, Pfeffer did such a brilliant job of making this a whole new kind of story.
There were some people on goodreads who wrote that it wasn't believable because there is no way that the world could become so evil in such a short period of time or forget about human decency.  I would argue that these folks are pretty naive and also not good students of history.  How long did it take Germany to descend into the evils of Nazism, without a natural disaster?  This book was fantastic!