John Marsden was a secondary school teacher before he started writing books and it shows with his writing. He has a knack for getting insider a teenager’s head and explaining how they’re feeling using their language. Let me tell you a bit about this book.
Seven teenagers go away to a place they call Hell for a camping holiday before going back to school. They have a great time and eventually come back to find war has started and everyone’s been herded into the showground. This is when they find they have to grow up and decide to take action against the enemy. They’re a mix of townsfolk and farmers and are friends from school. The action is located in a district somewhere in Australia, near to a port and some stunning scenery.
This is a very intense book, it starts off as a normal teenage book with normal teen relationships . There are some hints fairly early on as to what is likely to happen but I didn’t see them the first time I read it. The first time I was concentrating on the raw emotion that comes with this book and not any peripheral information that might actually be useful. There’s seven books in the series and I guess I’m going to have to make sure to read them all again, in order this time, to get the full impact.
I managed to miss the movie they made based on this book when it came out in the cinemas so I was fairly quick to borrow it when it came into the video shops. I watched it yesterday and was just amazed at how like the book it is. Like every movie made from a book, it’s incredibly hard to translate things exactly from book to movie so some things have been changed but they’re very much within the feel of the book. The actors they’ve chosen look almost exactly like they’ve been described in the book, except for Ellie, who I imagined as being more rugged and less slender but they’ve got Robyn down pat, the actor looks just young and innocent enough to pull off some of the scenes she’ll need to do should they make some of the later books into movies.
If you haven’t read this series or seen the movie, I can’t stress enough how much you need to read and view them. They are very much current Australia with current issues. The movie has been updated in that the heroes have mobile phones and use Skype, but it hasn’t been updated by much as the book was only written in 1993. There is no gender inequality, with both Ellie and Homer seeming to take charge, in fact, it’s Ellie who loses her cool first and tells one of the guys off for falling asleep at his post and Homer calms her down. It’s at this point that there’s some swearing and for the first time I wasn’t shocked or upset by the words as they just felt the perfect words for Ellie to use, she was upset and needed to get her message across in the most concise way, so she swore. I can understand that and have done the same thing on occasion, but never with her conciseness.
There is death and mayhem in both the book and the movie. One of the young girls is shot and her boyfriend, who’s fallen in love with her, takes her into the hospital to ensure she has a chance of surviving, knowing that the moment he’s seen he’ll be taken into custody and put with everyone else. This is what he does and they both manage to use the same cover story so as not to let the invaders know there are other teenagers out there.
In the book the invaders are not given a race, we are lead to believe they are from some country, possibly Asian. This is made slightly clearer in the movie as we actually see their faces a little. I’m not good at figuring out where different people are from but I’m sure someone else could do that very easily from the little we saw. I’m not sure that’s a good thing, I’d hate for it to ruin relationships between the two countries.
I have some books by John Marsden for sale on the website, but only the third book in this series. I’d list this copy of Tomorrow, When the War Began but it’s more than a little dogeared and creased and is only fit for the rubbish bin.
Hi Suz,
I’m with you all the way on this post. I read the entire series of books about 10 years ago and enjoyed it immensely. I regret not having read them in my teens because I imagine the experience would have been even more pleasurably, but my twentysomething still remembered enough of teenaged angst to relate. I was a bit concerned the movie might not live up to the book, but I think it actually did OK. The only thing I disliked was that the enemy was given a face. I always thought that one of the cleverest things John Marsden did was leave that up to our imagination…..it ensured the timelessness of the books…..alas the movie has spoilt that a little. Let’s hope future movie instalments of the series remain of a high standard.
Amber
Reading Habit
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