The Dead and the Gone
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The Dead and the Gone
Buy Now for $26.22
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Narrated by:
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Robertson Dean
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Written by:
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Susan Beth Pfeffer
About this listen
With haunting themes of family, faith, personal change, and courage, this powerful new novel explores how a young man takes on unimaginable responsibilities.
©2008 Susan Beth Pfeffer (P)2008 Random House, Inc.What listeners say about The Dead and the Gone
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 2021-06-19
Good story, but hard to listen
This book was well written and performed, it was also hard to listen to because you felt the desperation and fear of the characters. What Alex goes through to save his sisters and himself is so real. Have tissues while listening…
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Janey
- 2023-02-07
Misogynistic, Religious, White-Washed
Here's the thing... the concept of the story is actually pretty good, of course coming off of the same disaster from the first book "Life as we know it", I am always fascinated with mass disaster/apocalyptic type stories. However, the main character just SUCKS SO BAD. I understand this kid is going through the worst time of his life, but the character writing and development makes him so unlikeable. I hate the way he treats his sisters, and his friends. He is very negative, 'logically' minded, a little bit arrogant, definitely has some anger issues, he reminds me a little tiny bit of Holden from "Catcher in the Rye", really just overall bad vibes.
On top of the unlikeable main character, some of the choices made by the author were... interesting. This was told from the perspective of a first generation immigrant Puerto Rican boy, taking care of his two younger sisters, and the author clearly had a very stereotypical idea of what immigrant families might be like with them being portrayed as extremely religious, very old fashioned with 'traditional' gender roles, physical punishments from the father, etc. Basically, the whole thing was white-washed (there was maybe 4 words of Spanish used in the entire book, just to remind us of their origin now and again), it was just frustrating to see a POC character being portrayed very obviously from the perspective of a white lady.
Moving on from the white-washing to the blatant, unappealing, upsetting amount of sexism & misogyny. Main character was literally written as being a 16-year-old boy who did not know how to use a stove, how to clean anything, literally preform any basic task that any half-intelligent person (ESPECIALLY one who apparently was an honours student at the top of his class) would have known how to do. That was considered 'women's' work, and the main character would literally order his sisters around to clean or 'make him a sandwich' so to speak, he also hit them occasionally (although he very clearly felt very bad after, but 'feeling bad' after doesn't mean its not abuse, ridiculous). I just personally really hated the whole sexism thing the author had going on, especially given both of his sisters are clearly smart capable young ladies who in reality would not have stood for that cr4p and it would have been great to see them put him in his place and teach him a good lesson about respect and equity.
Next we have the problem of excessive amounts of relegion. Personally, relegion is not my cup of tea, but in particular I have a distaste for Christianity... and oh boy there is no end to that in this book. There is constant mentioning of god, gods mercy, praying to god, going to mass, confession with a priest, attending a catholic school, nuns, it went on and on and on. I understand relegion is a big part of this families life, but it felt very out-of-place at times in this post-disaster survival story; I felt it did not really enhance the story and was mostly just really dull and repetitive.
The narration was not bad at all really, a little hard to listen to at times just when the narrator imitated the younger teenage girls voices, but totally fair considering it's a grown man narrating. Anyway, narrating was okay, I just did not like the main character overall.
TLDR;
Honestly, I don't really think I would recommend this book to read as a follow up to the first one. It is nothing like the first book, the main character sucks and I never grew to like him (not even once) throughout the whole book and just found myself getting frustrated and bored with white-washed culture, sexism, abuse, and excessive mentioning of relegion. The reason why I stuck with it is because of course the story is compelling in the way that you want to know what will happen to the family next, how they survive, etc, but the ending is like REALLY disappointing anyway in my opinion so not really worth the money or the time.
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