DystopYA Challenge Book Two: Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden
John Marsden’s The Tomorrow Series is easily Australia’s most popular young adult series. Somehow, despite every other Australian reader I know having read it years ago, I had managed to completely overlook it until this week, when I picked up Tomorrow, When the War Began for the DystopYA Reading Challenge / The YA Dystopian Reading Challenge (see my original post on the challenges here). The book definitely lived up to its hype and popularity; I polished it off in only two sittings.
Tomorrow, When the War Began is told from the point of view of Ellie, a sixteen-year-old “rural” from fictional country-town Wirrawee. She and her friends go bush for a few days, attempting to reach the practically inaccessible Hell, a remote valley. With great difficulty they climb The Devil’s Staircase leading to it and then squeeze through metres of rock in a small cave before finally arriving in Hell, which they find to be a beautiful, hidden sanctuary from the pressures of life. When they emerge and travel home they find their homes empty of their families, their pets dead and all power and electricity shut off. Australia has been invaded by an unnamed foreign power while they were gone and almost everyone in the town has been captured. During their short trip their lives changed forever and now Ellie and her friends must fight to maintain their freedom and plan how to survive as guerillas.
Tomorrow, When the War Began is different to the norm of the dystopic genre; it lacks the oppressive social structure and rules of a totalitarian regime, instead it features characters trying to resist capture by an invading force yet to fully establish itself. It’s still dystopic, but it focuses on that period where a power is taking over, a time traditionally only briefly recapped or left a mystery in most other novels of this genre (eg The Giver by Lois Lowry, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and the list goes on).
The idea of a foreign nation becoming jealous of all the space at the disposal of Australians while their people are crammed together in slums, then deciding to invade it and colonise it, capturing Australians and intending for them later to become menial workers is an interesting one. A large percentage of Australians, mainly the middle to lower-income earners, have an irrational fear of Australia becoming overrun with refugees and immigrants. Regularly stories of asylum seekers entering our waters in rickety boats receive wide coverage and national debate, with the government maintaining a tough stance on the issue to keep voters happy. It’s very much an irrational fear considering “More than 1,600 boat people have arrived off Australia’s northwest coast this year, mainly people fleeing violence in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. The numbers are small compared with the tens of thousands of asylum seekers sailing across the Mediterranean to Europe each year.” It’s even more of a ludicrous fear since “as of June 30 (2009), a total of 48,456 people had overstayed their visa” in Australia, mostly English tourists. In Tomorrow, When the War Began Marsden plays on this fear, while never identifying the invader, and apparently no country fits the description that evolves throughout the series.
Marsden’s writing is tense and maintains a sense of urgency throughout the novel, making for an engaging experience. He establishes its sense of place expertly, capturing the essence of small town Australian life and culture without hamming it up for the international readers, something that really irritates me about some novels set in Australia. According to the Author’s Note at the end of the book Hell is based on Terrible Hollow, in the Australian Alps. Nicola Outdoors has some great pictures of the area up on her site, for anyone who’s interested.
Tomorrow, When the War Began is full of action, from combat, to concealment, hunting and hiding to infighting and a bit of the romantic variety of action too. Marsden’s characters are brave and likeable, and with compassion he examines how the adolescents deal with the violence and the emotional turmoil of an invasion.
Sookie Stackhouse Series Giveaway
I finally finished my law degree this week! After my last exam I settled down at home, exhausted, with a glass of champagne and cracked open Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris, which I had been saving for when I was finished and stress free to enjoy. The Sookie Stackhouse Series has helped me get through the second half of a very difficult semester by giving me something to look forward to doing at night after studying all day. Sookie is easy to relate to as a heroine despite her telepathic gift; she’s brave and independent with a bunch of steamy beaus on continual rotation, unlike the pining, somewhat pathetic Bella from The Twilight Saga. Sookie’s quick wit and attitude make spending an evening in Bon Temps, Louisiana with her and her ragtag bunch of human and supernatural friends and enemies a laugh-out-loud experience. Now that I’ve finished Dead and Gone I’m a bit sad to have no more Sookie books until May 2010. To both celebrate how much I’ve enjoyed this series and commiserate finishing all the currently published books in it I’ve decided to give two blog readers the chance to win a novel of their choice from The Sookie Stackhouse Series. This giveaway is open internationally; I’ll be shipping straight through Book Depository so to be eligible to enter you just have to live in one of the long list of countries they ship to. To enter simply comment on this post and tell me which vampire book is your favourite (any vampire book will do, not just those in the Sookie Stackhouse series) and why. In your comment you must also include your email address and the name of the Sookie book you want to win. I will contact you via your email address to request your mailing address should you win. For one extra entry write a post on your blog about this giveaway. For another extra entry add me to your blog roll. Remember to comment that you have done either of these to ensure your extra entry has been recorded. I will draw out the winners and announce them on this blog on Friday December 11.
To assist you in choosing which book you want here is a list of the series in chronological order: 1. Dead Until Dark, 2. Living Dead in Dallas, 3. Club Dead, 4. Dead to the World, 5. Dead as a Doornail, 6. Definitely Dead, 7. All Together Dead, 8. From Dead to Worse, 9. Dead and Gone.
Teaser Tuesdays
“I – without having appreciated the fact – I had been the one to see him last; or, rather, as all others rushed past, I had been the last to watch the indifferent earth rattling over his coffin, as over the nameless corpses of the world. I had a dead man for a client and the Day of Judgement as my hearing date.”
The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl page 9.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along!
- Grab your current read
- Open to a random page
- Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
- BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
- Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
Books Read in October ‘09
Books Read in October '09
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Review: here.
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
Review: here.
Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
Review: here.
Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris
Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris
Review: here.
Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris
I only have three books and a collection of short stories left to read in the Sookie Stackhouse series! I’m going to be sad when I have no new ones left to read. But at least Harris has another installment due to be released next May.
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
When the villagers of Eyam, Derbyshire, made the decision to quarantine themselves to prevent spreading the plague in 1666 they risked painful and grotesque deaths. Geraldine Brooks came across their story when holidaying in the English countryside, a lush, green, respite from her work as the Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. She was so touched by the villagers’ resolution that she decided it was the story she really wanted to tell and penned Year of Wonders, a fictionalised account of their ordeal sprinkled with anecdotes that had been passed down over the years.
Eyam’s terrible year is recounted through the eyes of housemaid Anna Firth, a timid and unlikely heroine at the book’s opening. She sees her family and the villagers perish one after the other, and then witnesses the survivors turn on each other. Year of Wonders is a story of both the best and worst of humanity; after the villagers make the selfless decision to quarantine themselves some commit to caring for the sick, while others give way to violence and hysteria, or prey on the hardships of others with opportunistic trickery. For the Black Death is not the only killer in Eyam, the ugly side of human nature claims more than one life.
Anna is taken under the wing of her employer, the rector’s wife Elinor, as a kind of protégée. She matures from a completely illiterate servant to Elinor’s trusted friend, confidant and advisor, as well as a sought-after herb dabbler and midwife. As the plague peaks and then diminishes the story gradually becomes concerned with the complex relationships between Anna, Elinor and her preacher husband Michael Mompellion. These connections see Anna go from the transformed to the transformer as she seeks to aid Mompellion, she becomes a kind of empowered Jane Eyre.
Brooks evokes the disgusting nature of the disease with skill: “I almost dropped the pitcher in my shock. The fair young face of the evening before was gone from the pallet in front of me. George Viccars lay with his head pushed to the side by a lump the size of a newborn piglet, a great, shiny, yellow-purple nob of pulsing flesh. His face, half turned away from me because of the excrescence, was flushed scarlet, or rather, blotched with shapes like rings of rose petals blooming under his skin. His blond hair was a dark, wet mess upon his head, and his pillow was drenched with sweat. There was a sweet, pungent smell in the garret. A smell like rotting apples.” Yet Brooks tells this tale of suffering, love, friendship and sacrifice so masterfully that even I, of a squeamish disposition, remained transfixed to the end. We live in a time where a new epidemic is perceived to be lurking in the not too far off future, and so to survive the Black Death alongside Anna in 1666, with little sophisticated medicine, no antibiotics and ignorance and superstition rife amongst the population was both a fascinating and terrifying experience.
Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon Recap
Books Read: 2 1/2 (Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris, Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris and half of Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks.
Pages Read: 583.
Challenges Participated in: 2
Blog Posts: 5.
I had a great time with my first ever attempt at the 24 Hour Readathon, I definitely want to try again next time it’s held!
Readathon Update
Currently Reading: Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris. I switched to it from Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks because I didn’t seem to be in the mood for it this morning.
Pages Read in the Last Hour: 48.
Pages Read Altogether: 395.
Books Finished: One (Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris).
Challenges Participated in: two (Books that Bite, Yoga Mini Challenge)
At this stage I should be on track to at least finish Definitely Dead before the Readathon time is up.
Readathon FAIL and Recreate Attempt
Sadly the lunch with a friend I was expecting to be at for three hours during the Readathon was extended into a girl’s night out, since my friend had just broken up with her boyfriend opting out of it to read wasn’t really an option. I arrived home around the time the Readathon finished and missed 11 hours of it. FAIL. Next year I’m going to remember to clear my schedule for it and just stay home. Since I’ve seen a bunch of people have extended the Readathon over two days I’m going to do that, starting at hour 14 today which is where I left off. One of my favourite things about the Readathon was the community feel to it with the mini challenges and so many people doing it at the same time, so it kind of sucks to do it over two days. But I’m going to go back over the mini challenges and do some as though I was doing the Readathon with everyone else.
Readathon Update/Who’s Keeping You Company?
Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon
Well it’s 11.30am here or hour 13 of the challenge (unfortunately I was asleep for about 6 of those but oh well!) so here’s an update on my progress:
Currently Reading: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks.
Books Read: One (Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris).
Pages Read Last Hour: 43.
Pages Read Altogether: 249.
Coffee Consumed Altogether: 1 1/2 cups.
Mini Challenges Completed: 1 (Books that Bite)
Blog Posts: 2 (including this one).
Speckle in Wonder at Year of Wonders
Who’s Keeping You Company? hosted by Under the Boardwalk. This competition closed while I was asleep but it looked fun so I thought I’d do it anyway.
I was reading on a banana chair in the backyard earlier and my pet chicken Speckle, who’s kind of angsty at the moment, kept me company. She’s a bit scary company at the moment, because you never know when she’s going to sneak up and give you a really hard peck when she’s so moody. I put my book down to try and get a picture of it with Speckle and she started attacking it; pecking it and scratching it with her feet, I even had trouble getting it back and had to shoo her away with a towel. I think I’m going to give it a bit of a wipe down before picking it up again. :/
Speckle Attacking Year of Wonders
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