It’s just that this particular book had all the standard elements. Religion, freaked out family, kinda-sorta-accepting family, high school drama club complete with theatre production, car crash, dog, non-explicit sex, formal/prom. Even now I’m having trouble not confusing it with ‘that one where it’s the school newspaper and one of them is a photographer’, which is um.. The Year They Banned the Books by Nancy Garden.

I suppose it’s a little unfair of me to say it’s just like all the other books, when it’s from 1997 and set in New Zealand. To some extent, the other books are like it.

The New Zealand setting didn’t affect things much. Just some of the terms were different, and my edition had a handy glossary in the front. Not everything was in there, but I was pleased to see “goolies” made the cut. No censorship in the glossary.

I notice on Amazon that Kirkus is quoted as saying “[a] steamy, brilliant girl-on-girl romance”. Either they’re operating from a different definition of “steamy” than I am, they’re counting the hot tub scene as full of steam, or my edition really was edited!

I like the size of the book. Smallish and thin both, with a photo depiction of each of the girls on one side.

The book was readable, but I was rolling my eyes a few times. It got heavily teen angsty in one or two spots. Or was it three or four?

And early on there’s this scene where the girls are working in a fast food place and the guy in charge is sexually harassing like every girl who works for him. And though most of them don’t like it, no one does anything productive about it! Like, tell, ANYONE. Like, threaten him with a LAWSUIT. Like, QUIT! So the book has left a skeevy vibe behind all because of this one guy who isn’t even terribly relevant to the rest of the plot.

The priest’s reaction is refreshing, but I have to say not terribly convincing and believable to me. Fast food guy can sexually harass his employees without consequences, but Catholic priest can say whatever he likes about homosexuality?

At least.. I assumed he was Catholic. Or remembered him as Catholic. Is that the only Christian religion where they’re called priests and they’re celibate? Well, anyway… don’t tell the Pope what he’s been saying in 1997.

So, in sum, enough is enough. Next angsty gay teen romance I read had better at least have some zombies in it. And I hate zombies.

Which is perhaps a damning criticism because the book was just one giant mystery made up of little mysteries. And I just didn’t care.

The main character is either a kid in the contemporary real world who goes to school, etc, or he’s a kid with a bunch of other kids flying a spaceship in the future. He’s ‘prexing’, a word which I never did figure out, and just falling into this hallucinatory state where he believes he’s living out the life of a 20th-21st century Earth kid. Or he’s actually that kid.

On the ship, it’s a group of I dunno maybe half a dozen kids, who don’t really know what they’re doing or where they’re going. And there’s like creatures and jel and dangerous random things they have to fight off, and I don’t even know why. And two of the kids are plotting, but not secretively or very well, to get voice control over the computer. But whatever.

So the mysteries are, like, what’s this prexing thing about, why are these kids on the ship, because they don’t really know themselves, what is this ship and why was it built, where are they going, etc, etc. And why is it called Deepwater anyway?

Well, you won’t get answers to all of those questions by reading the book. (And darned if I’m going to read any more in the series to try to find them either.) And the answers that are provided are full of crap science that I’d love to pick apart, but would be major spoilers. Because what’s the point at all of reading this book if I tell you what’s going on in it? None. But it fails biology and it fails astronomy. It probably also fails physics generally. Maybe ecology.

There certainly is potential in the overarching idea, and enough hand-waving would’ve made me fine with the poor science. However, it would’ve had to have done a lot more with the characters. I couldn’t see most of them even 2-dimensionally, let alone 3. One of them had the annoying tendency to learn things and then not want to tell anyone else. And she was pretty much the most developed of all the characters.

My recommendation has to be to give this one a pass. If you want kids alone on a spaceship, try Marion Zimmer Bradley or Dom Testa.

Ellie and the other survivors face an impossible decision: they can flee for the mountains or surrender. Or they can fight.

Review:
Itâ€s been several weeks now since I finished Tomorrow, When the War Began. Normally, I write a bookâ€s review as soon as I finish reading it, but I feel like Iâ€m still processing this one to some extent, trying to figure out exactly how I feel about it.

This is due in part to the fact that I have greatly enjoyed the other books by John Marsden that I have read, and so built this series up in my mind as something that was going to be jaw-droppingly amazing. And when it turned out not to be so, even though itâ€s still quite good in general and genuinely riveting in parts, I was a kind of disappointed.

This is the story of seven Australian teenagers (later eight) living in the rural town of Wirrawee who go camping while their parents and most of the people in town are attending a fair. The kids return to find that a mysterious military force has invaded Australia and has imprisoned most of the townspeople at the fairgrounds, including their families. They must decide what, if anything, they’re going to do to help. Ellie Linton has been tasked with chronicling their story.

Large portions of the tale are pretty fascinating. The teens are resourceful and rise to the occasion, especially Ellieâ€s clown/daredevil childhood friend, Homer, who emerges as the groupâ€s leader, and Fiona, a ladylike rich girl who proves to have unexpected reserves of courage. While Homer is the tactician of the group, Ellie seems to find herself trusted with the most dangerous missions, which require some quick, inventive thinking on her part in difficult situations involving things like exploding lawn mowers, demolition derby bulldozers, and exploding gas tankers.

I even liked the parts of the story where the characters talk about what theyâ€re going to do—are we going to hide out here in our camping spot, or are we going to try to engage the enemy somehow?—and the various supplies theyâ€re going to need from town, whether to keep chickens, etc. Where the story really bogs down, however, is with the introduction of romance.

Ellie has never considered Homer in a romantic way before, but begins to see him in a new light given his metamorphosis. Meanwhile, sheâ€s also intrigued by Lee, the inscrutable Asian musician, and Homer has fallen for Fiona. Ellie dwells a lot on her confusion before ultimately deciding upon Lee, and then telling readers about all the making out their doing and how she has learned the things that make him groan, etc. I kept thinking how embarrassing all of this will be for Lee whenever he/anyone reads this official chronicle!

Anyway, itâ€s not that I am anti-romance or anything, but itâ€s just that these scenes really slow down the pace of the story. And maybe that is the point. Even if something as dramatic as an invasion has occurred, there will still be a lot of downtime if youâ€re hiding out in the woods, and a lot of time for more mundane things to be going on.

I guess what it boils down to is that my perception of the book has been hampered by my expectations. I am certainly going to read the rest of the series, and hopefully I will like it better now that Iâ€ve reconciled myself to what it actually is rather than what I thought it was.

I believe the American title is Jellicoe Road and the original title is On the Jellicoe Road. This cover is the most unappealing cover to me. I’m not big on flowers as design elements and orange flowers are the absolute worst. Especially on book covers. It did not make a good first impression.

When I finished the book I was mad at it.

The non-spoily summary is: Taylor Markham is a teenager living in a boarding school after her mother abandoned her. And there’s a ‘war’ going on between the students, the locals, and a group of cadets who come for several weeks every year. And she finds out who she is and makes friends and blahdeblahblah.

This review is going to get increasingly spoiler-filled, so feel free to stop when you feel like you’ve been spoiled just the right amount.

There are two narratives running through the story. Taylor’s first person story and snippets from a manuscript her guardian is writing. At first I felt detached. The very first thing we get is a car crash with dead people, but it’s in the manuscript, so it doesn’t count? Then Taylor seems to do things without really knowing why she’s doing them or even how she’s feeling. At least that’s how it comes across to me as a reader. She’s in charge of her House now, even though she seems bad at it. And there’s a decided lack of adults around. Hannah, the woman who’s nominally her guardian and unofficially in charge of her House isn’t actually officially attached to the school. So when she disappears, it’s not like things are much different? And no adult comes in to fill her place. The kids seem oddly on their own a whole lot of the time. Especially considering these are Hogwarts-age kids we’re talking about. And they even have to do their own cooking!

So there’s this war between the students, the Townies, and the Cadets over territory. And the rules are convoluted. But mostly I was just confused. Why is there this war? Why do the adults not care? Taylor seems oddly surprised when some of the boys start physically fighting. What kind of war is it that that’s not part of the point of it? It’s just weird.

Meanwhile we have this whole other set of characters we’re supposed to keep track of, in this manuscript Hannah has been writing for over a decade. They’re all full of angst.

I can sort of see this book is well-crafted, in that we learn more about Taylor’s past bit by bit, as she learns it too. It’s a tough thing to pull off, authorially. (Although I do have some time/number quibbles. Suddenly a 17-hour drive is only 7 hours. And there’s a date thing that’s screwed up after that.)

But by the end, I was mad. Mad mad mad.

(Major spoilers now.)

Dead people everywhere and suicides and bleh bleh blecch. And adults that WON’T TELL HER THINGS. It’s sort of the worst combination of things in kid’s books. Those things show up everywhere and are hella annoying each and every time. I mean in kid’s books in general, but also in this book in particular!

And this phrase keeps running around in my mind when I think about this book, so I’ll go ahead and type it: I felt manipulated.

So I can see how some people might think it’s Teh Awesome. But I have a lot of trouble appreciating its craft when it annoyed the heck out of me and made me outright mad by the end.

I gave it 3 stars on Goodreads the moment I finished reading it. Though I was hesitant even then. I may yet go back and change it to 2.

Back when I was originally supposed to do this review, I had chosen a book called The Man Who Knew Too Much by David Leavitt. I tried reading this book. Then a long time later, I tried again. Then I just had such a block against even trying that I let it sit around and sit around. Finally about a month ago, I thought I’d look up what my other options are. There are surprisingly few books all about Turing. And no children’s books I could find. I borrowed two through interlibrary loan. One was a hefty textbook-looking thing. I didn’t even crack that one open. The other was Alan Turing: The Architect of the Computer Age by Ted Gottfried and written for a YA audience.

Finally, a book I could get through!

The problem with the Leavitt book was it was too dry and full of footnotes. Of course I’ve read dry things with footnotes before, and it’s fine if the subject is interesting enough, as Alan Turing certainly should’ve been. But it also suffered from a lot of time-jumping that was driving me up the wall. It was pretending to be chronological, but the author kept inserting comments about how this and that and the other thing would happen later. I just wanted a nice story about his childhood and time in school and everything that follows after that.

The YA book gave me that. There are a few spots where there’s a comment inserted. Like, spoiler alert, he’s going to get into running eventually, with Olympic potential. But it happened much less frequently.

I wouldn’t call this book eminently readable; I have read much better, more enjoyable nonfiction. In fact at first it was reminding me of school history books and I was thinking ‘no wonder I found history boring’. But once I got used to the style, it was fine. Plus the subject matter was very interesting.

I had watched, years ago, (even before this review was originally due), the docudrama, “Breaking the Code”, about Alan Turing. It’s great and I highly recommend watching it. In fact I intend to watch it again before the weekend is out.

What I failed to get a sense of from the movie that I got from the book was just how geeky a kid he was. In a time and place where it was not very nice at all to be a geeky boy (there are many times and places like that, of course). It also surprised me to learn just how absent his parents were. It’s not that they dumped him at boarding school, which you sort of expect, but they weren’t even in the country for large portions of his childhood. He’s still a toddler and they’ve both gone back to India. And not even left him with grandparents or aunts and uncles. Even when his father’s job in India is over, the two of them move to France! It’s just so bizarre to me.

The book does a pretty good job of explaining Turing’s accomplishments in mathematics, biology, and of course computer science in a way that’s understandable to me, and probably understandable to most high school students. It also doesn’t shy away from talking about his evolving identity as a gay man and his relationships with other boys and men, and one woman. I didn’t feel like the book was leaving things out to protect the Impressionable Youth ™.

Several times Gottfried referenced the biography by Andrew Hodges. K read and reviewed that book, if you’d like to read her review.

Halfway through the book, I stumbled upon photos. I hadn’t realized there were photo pages in the middle. I never like photo pages being in the middle of the book. I might like to see a picture of Turing as a child, while I’m still reading about his time in school. And then I get to the photos and start looking at them, and then there’s spoilers! It happened with Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book too. So I refrained from looking and went back later, after finishing the book.

The author describes the adult Turing as ‘unhandsome’, but I don’t see that. Maybe it’s the 50’s hairstyle that makes him look like the typical handsome dark-haired man. Or maybe I don’t know what ‘handsome’ means. In a group photo, I can see a little more what the author’s talking about. But I still don’t see him as looking geeky or mad scientist-like. The author a couple of times refers to his appearance or laugh as like a mad scientist.

I paused in the descriptions of a Turing machine to play a second time with today’s Google Doodle. I don’t know if either helped me understand the other more, but it was a nice break from reading.

Turing’s birthday anniversary is only today, but Gay Pride Month lasts until June 30th. So take the opportunity to read or watch more about Alan Turing. He’s an important part of science history and an important part of gay history.

Published in 1987, this novel recounts the fictional story of one young New Zealand swimmer as she tries to win a spot on the 1960 Olympic team.

I’m going to save the spoilers for the end, so you can stop reading when you get to them if you don’t want to be spoiled.

When I first picked up the book, I was expecting a quick, easy read. But then it turned out to be one of those publications from the 1980s where the print is tiny and cramped and so the book wasn’t as short as I thought. I went ‘ugh’ and put it aside for later. Once I finally did pick it up again and start reading, it was easier than expected. Overall, I’d say I liked the book. It was an interesting read.

I wouldn’t classify myself as someone who likes sports books and reading about jocks, which is what this book is, so I’d say I liked it despite of that rather than because of it. The main character is likeable, even if I want to just shake her plenty of times. We hear about her rivalry with a swimmer who usually beats her, her family which sacrifices for her, her friends and her school life.

What probably interested me the most was the gender stuff. And the book opens right away with that, with Alex reacting an article written in a women’s section of a paper. How despite training hard, she and her rival also have “feminine” interests and things like that.

It was a little odd to be reading a book that was ~25 years old written about a time nearly 30 years before that. In a way, it felt very much like an 80s book, even though it was written about the late 50s. There were times where I felt it was being a little too obvious about “the 50s were a different time, especially for girls”, and a little preachy about drinking and driving. One character asks rhetorically and hyperbolically whether he should’ve taken his drunk friend’s keys away from him. The 80’s audience is meant to think “Yes, yes, you should’ve!!”

At some point, I started questioning the author’s research. I was stopped by wondering how a girl swims with her period, and had to do some Googling. I had a vague notion that pads were way different and weird in the 50s. Turns out it’s not an easy thing to Google, probably because Wikipedia is written mostly by men. But I did discover that tampons have been around longer than I thought. Not that I’d want to be a 14 year old in the 50s wearing them in a swimming pool. Especially since one of the pools is described as a warm soup of chlorinated salt water. YUCK!

It’s not until nearly the end of the book that it was confirmed for me that tampons were involved.

Yes, dear readers, it’s a book about periods! Well, not really, but it didn’t shy away from it. Even though it was coy about the tampons until the end.

So when Julie Andrews’ voice is mentioned, I had to stop and Google that too. This is before Sound of Music, so how did kids in New Zealand not only know about her, but hear her voice? Well, she was on Broadway in the mid-50s and made a TV appearance just about the time this book takes place. So I gave the author a pass, on the theory that theatre geeks would have records of her Broadway singing. Maybe.

Oh yes, I neglected to mention that Alex is a theatre geek. And a hockey player. And a piano player. And good in school. And into ballet. And I feel like I’m forgetting at least one other activity. She’s doing so many things at once that thinking about it, I just want to lie right down on the floor and take a nap. Most kids would consider being in a theatre production and one other activity plenty. Or, you know, maybe training for the Olympics is enough! She even practices piano for an hour a day. At least we finally learn she’s not so good at school as we were led to believe. At least judging by the grades she got.

A lot of the book is about how she’s doing too many things at once, but she keeps doing them! And nobody forces her to stop. Not her parents, not her coach, not anyone at school.

In the end, I had to trust the author got things right. Or at least more right than I could’ve. Her bio says she was a swimmer in the 50s in New Zealand. So, yea, I don’t have a leg to stand on with my Googling.

Alex’s relationship with her boyfriend is what bothered me the most. She’s 14 and he’s 17. Which, all right. Though her parents and his seem completely fine with this! Her father even arranges a beach trip for her and her boyfriend and gives them alone time to do like, whatever. :} When they do make out, the first time, and subsequent times, her reaction to it is completely unbelievable to me.

Alex is tall and plays the men’s roles in plays in the all-girl school she attends. And there have been comments hinting she might be a lesbian. So she’s a little insecure about her femininity, though mostly she doesn’t let it bother her.

So here’s her first time making out with her older boyfriend.

“I’m also regarded by some as a second best specimen of femininity around the place — except that Andy not only kissed me so many times I lost count on that day of the bridge walk, but also, later in the car, very gently traced the outline of my breast with his fingers, deliciously reassuring me of my femininity…”

The thoughts of a 14 year old? I didn’t buy it.

Throughout the book, she kept seeming to me to be about 16. It was really hard to remember she was 14 and barely 15 by the end of the book.

I’m a big believer that kids are smarter and know and see more things than authors usually give them credit for. But that doesn’t mean they’re emotionally mature.

Okay, I’m going to venture into spoiler territory now. So be warned!

*** Spoilers ***

Remember the drunk driver I mentioned before? Well, Alex and her boyfriend do get out of the car. And then it gets into a wreck, justifying their actions. But the driver and his girlfriend, despite her being thrown completely out of the car, only have minor injuries. If you’re going to try to teach us not to drink and drive, especially without seatbelts, maybe you should give them believable injuries, huh?

But this was just foreshadowing.

About halfway through the book, I had a sneaking suspicion something was going to happen to her boyfriend. And lo and behold I was right. Don’t drink and drive, kids, but that doesn’t matter, because a drunk driver will kill you anyway. The only surprise was that this death meant her ailing grandmother who was “fading away” didn’t have to die.

Sigh. I haven’t read as many Newbery books as K has, but I’ve still read enough books like this to be fed up with the trope. The only thing that would’ve made it more trope-y was if her boyfriend was gay.

And then she’s all.. I have to go to the Olympics for him. And having some weird telepathic conversation with his ghost while she’s racing. Like, not just talking to him in her head, but he’s actually feeding her information she shouldn’t be able to know. Um, all right.

So I liked the book, but liked it much less by the end of it.

I’ll end this review not with a bang, but with a siiiiiiiiigh.

The story is essentially about three kids in New Zealand. Tane, his best friend since forever, Rebecca, and his older brother, called Fatboy. Tane and Rebecca are chatting about time travel and hit on the idea that all you really need is a receiver and you could get any messages that people from the future were sending back. So as you may guess, it doesn’t take them long to find these messages. Takes them a little longer to decode them.

At this point in the story, it’s okay. I like time travel stories and who doesn’t like a book with some good codes and cryptic messages in them? The style of the writing was what I’d characterize as very YA-y. By that I mean it tries to be a little clever, while treating the reader as a bit of an idiot. It’s hard to pick out a specific example, but this sort of captures it:

That may not have sounded like much, but it wasn’t very often that Rebecca thought that Tane had an interesting idea, so it was kind of an important day, if only for that reason.

Although, in hindsight, it was actually an important day for much bigger reasons than that.

I like my foreshadowing to be more subtle than that, but actually this quote illustrates another thing that started to bug me pretty quickly. Tane is a spineless, weak-willed jellyfish. (Which is ironic, considering what they end up fighting later.) ((See what I did there?)) Rebecca is super-smart when it comes to science and technical things. Supposedly. So when they start talking about time travel, she says things he doesn’t understand. He pretends he does. Not to boost his own ego or save face, but just so he doesn’t disrupt her flow of conversation and thought processes.

Apparently Rebecca is also a bit of an activist and goes on protest marches a lot. Tane goes with her. Not because he cares two whits about the protest. He doesn’t even take the time to learn what they’re protesting about. Just because she wants him to go. Look, there’s being supportive of a friend and doing things because they like to do them, and then there’s… being a spineless jellyfish. It’s not that he’s a martyr, because he doesn’t mope about saying how he doesn’t want to be there. He pretends he does. So that’s two cases of him lying to her and deceiving her just to… be friends with her? How has this friendship lasted since birth?

When his older brother asks her out and the two start dating, you can only cheer for them. It’s not like she should be going out with Tane! How much worse would he get about this all if he were actually her boyfriend? Ugh.

I thought, maybe, maybe, the author is just being a bit heavyhanded and this is a lesson Tane is supposed to learn by the end of the book. He’s supposed to grow and change and turn into his own person and not be pushed around by Rebecca (who doesn’t even realize she’s pushing him around, since he goes along with it so easily). This does not happen. Tane does get less annoying, but mostly because the story stops focusing so much on their relationship, not because he’s actually grown into a less annoying person.

So I’m digging on the codes for a little while. Rebecca whips up this program to analyze signals and whatnot. It’s reminding me a bit of that series of choose your own adventure type books that were all about programming in BASIC. It had the programs and you had to put them into your computer, and usually debug them or alter them in some way to fit the story. You were a secret agent who was also a kid and a computer whiz. Anyway, they were awesome. So a book that reminds me of those in some small way gets a little boost to my opinion of it.

That didn’t last long. Most of the codes are cryptic in a way the reader couldn’t ever figure out. Heck, most of them are cryptic in a way the characters couldn’t figure out. Which is just bad cryptozizing skills! These messages are meant for Tane and Rebecca, so they ought to be written so they can figure them out. Of course it doesn’t help that they are idiots.

What do you think this means?

202.27.216.195,GUEST,COMPTON1.

Yea, she’s writing a program in one chapter and completely stumped by this a little later. It’s Tane who eventually (eventually) figures it out, by harkening back to something they learned in school. LEARNED IN SCHOOL!!

This book was written in 2008, btw.

And that’s the most legible of messages, to the reader. The rest you can only figure out as the story progresses. Because they’re crap. If you’re going to shorten the word ‘bitmap’, why would you not use BMP? Why would you use BTMP? The theory in this book is that the messages have to be written to save as much bandwidth as possible. (They don’t call it bandwidth, but yea, essentially.) Why add a letter there? And not add a letter where it would make more sense to? On top of that, yea, there’s an actual bitmap sent through. If you’ve got the space to be sending an image, you’ve got the space to write a few complete words. Kthnx.

So now that the book has annoyed me on several fronts, and I was seriously thinking Forever War a more interesting read (until that ticked me off so so hard, but more on that in a later Nebula Project discussion), the book takes a 90-degree turn.

‘Book 2’ of the book, which is to say the next section of the book, shifted in tone. Suddenly things weren’t about time travel and codes and Tane being jealous of Fatboy without ever telling anyone, but about this bioterror threat and almost-dead 4-year olds. It got pretty serious and rather dark awfully fast.

There’s more action in the back half of the book. Boring action. I was skimming it, because I hate action scenes without any character or emotion really pushing it and backing it. It also wasn’t written very well, but that was par for the book. Not that it was bad writing. It was competent writing. It just didn’t read easily to me. It didn’t flow.

The action also stops centering around the three kids. There are suddenly a lot of scenes with adults as POV characters. Adults who weren’t even in the first part. Until the end we’re jumping between all sorts of different people, fighting battles, and just.. blah. I was glad when I finally finished it.

Not that the end didn’t suck.

Okay, now I need to talk about the spoilery bit. It’s two paragraphs in white font below. Highlight it to read it, if you don’t mind me ruining the Big Surprise. Otherwise skip down to the second set of –‘s.

—

So there’s this Chimaera Project, which is playing with viruses and trying to cure the common cold, essentially. But things go wrong. Very very wrong. It’s not a mutant virus getting out and killing everyone though, oh no. It’s the planet taking the opportunity to create ginormous antibodies and macrophages to seek out humans and destroy them. Oh, and they look like jellyfish and snowman. Because, of course they would. This is the perfect opportunity for a Maori lesson on treating the Earth respectfully and whatnot. And the soldiers get all upset at being told this, because they’re offended at being considered germs. Oookay.

Yea, no. Been there, read that. It wasn’t very well-executed in the book I read it in either. (I resist naming names, because it might be a spoiler for that book.) Plus however many movies and TV episodes involve being shrunk and injected into somebody’s body.

—

Now for some final, non-spoilery thoughts.

Tane was remarkably self-aware and sensitive to other people’s thoughts and emotions. Granted, mostly Rebecca’s. It struck me as ungenuine for a 14-year old boy. However, the author is male, so I’m not sure if I have a better grasp on what teen boys are capable of than he does. It’s like.. he knows he’s jealous and why. And even he even knows that his brother knows that he’s jealous. He knows all these things, he’s aware of all these things, and he still doesn’t say anything or act on them at all!! In contrast, Rebecca must be mostly oblivious, since she doesn’t seem to know (or perhaps to care?) that he’s not into protesting or that he doesn’t like her dating his brother.

In another situation, I might like Tane for that and think the book is a breath of fresh air. But Tane was that spineless jellyfish, so his insight just made that trait all the worse.

Some of the chapters have song snippets at the head of them, and near the end, the soldiers start singing a song. I felt like all the songs were ridiculous and out of place. Yellow submarine? Really? I feel like if you’re going to use quotes like this, they should be there for a good reason. Not because the song popped into your head while you were writing that chapter.

So, yea, redeeming qualities of the book are a smart girl character, the unusual (to me) setting of New Zealand, and the glimpses of Maori culture. If that’s a combination you’re looking for, go for it.

My Thoughts
I’ll begin by stating that I’ve never been a huge fan of the dystopian genre. It’s hard for me to explain exactly why: I’ve read many examples of this genre and even enjoyed them. They’re often very important books, which can serve to illustrate the slippery slope society is currently on, or could easily begin rolling down. But on a fundamental level they bother me. It’s not just that the excuse for the dystopian elements being introduced is often flimsy or poorly explained (but that is a big and common problem). It may be that I just don’t really want to think about the world being so disturbingly screwed up. Especially since much of the time these books don’t really provide any hint that conditions will improve for most people even after the heroes have done what they’re going to do.

That said, while Tomorrow, when the War Began shares many traits with books in the currently burgeoning Dystopian YA category, I’m not sure if I would put it there or not. My feeling is that in a typical example of the genre, you begin with the dystopic situation already well-established. Whatever events led to its creation may or may not be within living memory or even remembered at all. In either case it’s usually very entrenched by the time the reader and the hero arrives on the scene. That is not the case here. Ellie and her friends are typical rural Australian teens, living in or near a small town with their families. Their lives are normal (though pre-internet and cellphone, as this was originally written in the early 90s). They decide to have a camping trip into the bush to better enjoy the tail end of summer vacation before school starts up again, so a group of seven boys and girls head off to camp in an area even more remote than some of their family ranches. Author Marsden takes advantage of the camping interlude, which comprises the initial 20% of the book, to try and flesh out the characters as they are before circumstances will force them to change. His success there is only middling, as it’s difficult to establish the personalities of seven individuals in such a small space without resorting to stereotypes to fill in the blanks. Happily, he mostly avoids using such stereotypes as a crutch for most of them, with the exception perhaps of Fiona, who seems to me pretty much straight out of the rich-pretty-girl box.

The action gets started when our group of high schoolers returns from their camping trip to find something strange has happened. The family ranches which they arrive at first are abandoned, animals have been killed, the power is out, and there’s no hint as to where the people have gone. We have another instance of win here where the kids are appropriately creeped out and cautious as a result of these oddities, but not really ready to let themselves imagine what might have happened. (Though I did find it odd that none of them seemed to speculate about alien abduction. Is that just too ridiculous? But the situation was bizarre! If that’s not a time to let your imagination out, I don’t know when it is.) They soon conclude the area has been invaded by some outside aggressor, a conclusion which is confirmed when they find a fax sent by a parent waiting for them at one of the abandoned houses.

What I most enjoyed about the book at this point was that the ambitions of the characters matched their abilities and knowledge. They did not (spoilers!) put together an amazing plan to destroy the invaders; they did not hack into the national defense system and save the world; they did not even come up with an improbable and complicated plan to free all of the hostages being held at the camp in the town. They kept their goals small and attainable, and had a realistic amount of problems in executing them. They were upset, scared and tempted to try and run away from it all — and not at all positive that wouldn’t be the best course of action anyway.

That’s not to say it was perfect. Perhaps its biggest weakness was the treatment of the female versus the male characters. While everyone is portrayed as very competent and there’s no real arguing that the girls are going to be equal and equally effective partners in their resistance efforts, was it really necessary to have the only two characters to have a dramatic mental breakdown be female? I don’t think it would have affected the story at all if, say, Kevin had been the one to see his home destroyed and had gone hysterical as a result. That it was Corrie instead just undercut the generally positive portrayal of girls in the book.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t comment on the truly appalling cover art on the edition of the book which I read. It is hideous. If I had picked this book up off the shelf in the bookstore, intrigued by the title, I would most likely have put it right back down after seeing this bizarro picture on the front. Fortunately, more recent editions have come out with a much more modern, appealing set of covers.

In Short
Tomorrow, when the War Began is a solid entry in the genre of YA speculative fiction with a dystopian bent. It also scores well on gender equality, though there were a few bits here and there along those lines that troubled me. It would work well enough as a standalone book, but it very clearly leaves so many threads unresolved that it’s a good thing the series continued. Even though the topic isn’t exactly my cup of tea, I may find myself tracking down the rest to find out how it all turns out.

Ellie and her friends live in a smallish town with a large rural area, so that she and a lot of her friends are ranchers. At least I think they’re ranchers. They’re on holiday, so they organize a camping trip into the bush. This being Australia. Seven of them, roughly evenly divided by gender. They’re missing Commemoration Day (also called Commem Day by the narrator) and the local Show (which sounds like the equivalent of a county fair around here). On that day, while they’re out camping, they hear and see lots of jets flying overhead. Weird, right? They linger a few more days, then head back. To find everyone gone. Utoh. From the title of the book, you might guess a war of some sort has ‘began’, huh?

I was going to start this review by saying it was fitting to be reading it in February, since most of the action takes place then. Only when I tried to look up the exact date for Commemoration Day, I got stumped! Thwarted! The closest I came to any such holiday was one celebrated by the University of Sydney. According to Wikipedia, Australia Day has a lot of different names, and would fit the timeframe (the narrator says at one point that it’s several weeks past Christmas), but Commem or Commemoration Day isn’t one of them! Have I come up with an anachronism? This book was written in 1993. Well, that’s not that old… older than Wikipedia, sure, but..

The author’s note at the end equates some of the settings to real world locations, but the author is generally making up the location itself. Did he also invent a holiday? Weird. Sure, this is science fiction, in that there was no such war in Australia, but otherwise it reads like a contemporary novel. Why invent a holiday? This reviewer is also puzzled by it.

But moving on…

The group discovers that their town has been invaded. Though I thought it funny they came to that conclusion. If I saw a bunch of soldiers who’d set up camp and were holding prisoners, foreign soldiers would not be my first thought. Could I tell American ones from non-American ones, at a distance? There are so many different types of American military uniform, that I don’t think I could. Not unless I could see a US flag patch on them. Or more likely, a US flag flying nearby. But this group assumes they’re foreign before they ever hear them speak. Which is another puzzlement, because the girl who knows six languages can’t identify it. What? You mean, not at all? I can take a good guess at most languages. A general guess, I mean. And we never hear what the soldiers look like. We hear they’re young, and middle-aged, and male and female. But not if they look Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese. How many nearby countries don’t speak English and yet look enough like Australians that it doesn’t merit a mention?

I admit, before we learned they don’t speak English, I thought America had invaded Australia. It’s just.. something we’d be likely to do.

One of the kids even identifies some jets as Australian and some as not. Boy, for me to recognize jets, they’d have to be flying really low. And, again, have a US flag on them. Southwest jets, sure, I can identify those!

So anyway, the kids try to find out what’s up with their families, and try not to get killed or captured along the way. And guerrilla hijinks ensue. So that by the end it was reminding me of Hogan’s Heroes or other shows and movies I’ve seen that featured The Resistance.

I liked that the group was roughly evenly distributed, and eventually does end up 4 girls and 4 guys, and that the narrator was a girl. She also does a lot of the action and dirty work. She’s their best driver, especially when it comes to driving bulldozers and trucks. Which is why I was particularly dismayed when one of the girls has some sort of seizure brought on by trauma. Followed by another girl just fainting, for no particular reason. And then the narrator herself has a nervous breakdown or goes into catatonia or something I’m not qualified to medically diagnose. Though considering she’d been bleeding copiously from a head wound just a few pages ago, you’d think people would’ve been worried about a head injury and not assuming it was all psychological! None of the boys goes through any of this. Grr.

Then they all start flinging around the L word (love, not lesbian) like it’s going out of fashion.

In general, though, I liked the book okay. It was interesting to see Australia, even if it’s a fictional bit of it, and to learn a few new words. I’d had no clue what a chook was until it was mentioned that they lay eggs. At that point, I gave up and Googled it. No such luck they’re ostriches or emus or some weird Australian bird. Chooks are just chickens.

The cover art on the copy I read makes no sense until you’ve read nearly the whole book. I think I would’ve gone for some shot of the Australian terrain with some jets flying overhead. The cover we had up here on Triple Take in our Upcoming section does make more sense, with the jets flying over the ferris wheel at the Show.

Read it if you’d like to read some Australian sf, but don’t read it if you’re looking for answers to mysteries. We never do learn who invaded Australia or why.

Except when I was adding the cover images just now, I saw that the newer cover mentions this is part 1 of a series. The book itself felt complete enough, in a ‘this is our life now’ sort of way, that it never occurred to me there could be more books which might explain what this war is all about. Now, do I read the sequel? Do I watch the movie? Do I watch the movie sequel which is apparently coming out this year? Decisions, decisions.

That being the case, I can’t say I was disappointed by it particularly. But, man, was it so not my type of book. The best thing I can say about it was that it didn’t take long to read. Perhaps an hour and a half or so.

The main character, whose name I have already forgotten, — Callum? Collum? — has this crazy, sick guy screaming at him about how he should go into hiding for the next year. So we begin our countdown. The story is told by day and by hour:minute, hence at least part of the reason to equate it to “24”. The page count also goes down, something I didn’t figure out until more than halfway through, because I was reading so fast it took me that long to look at the page numbers twice. (I was impressed I’d gotten to page 121 as quickly as I did! Until I discovered a little later I was ‘only’ on page 091.) What struck me as odd about this format was that the story was still told in the past tense. If the goal was to give a sense of immediacy and ‘in the moment’, then it should’ve been in present tense.

So right after this guy rants at him and gets carted off by police or some mysterious people, the main character is in a storm in a boat. And then nearly eaten by sharks. Yea, just like that! We haven’t had a chance to get to know this character at all, and he’s already, randomly, nearly dying a few times. The book continues like that. Kidnappings, shootings, mysterious notes, without any real sense that the main character is truly affected by any of it. The frequent use of exclamation points seems to stand in for his emotion. ! !!

About the time he’s running around and choosing not to tell his mother or the cops about being kidnapped, I’m thinking.. at least he’s like.. 17 or 18, right? (The picture on the cover certainly looks about that.) But no, I’d missed a page right at the beginning that states right up front he’s 15. At this point, I’m finding it all rather incredible. And not at all in a good way. Who has their house broken into and burgled and the cops don’t come? Who gets kidnapped and doesn’t tell their mother or the cops? Who runs away rather than go up to the police and say ‘hey, dude, I totally didn’t hurt my little sister?’ What was he afraid of? At that point, he should’ve been glad if they had arrested him and stuck him in jail. It would’ve been safer for him! (!!)

I get sick and tired of male characters, particularly teenage boy ones, who think they have to ‘protect’ their mother by not telling her things! She’s a freaking adult. You’re a freaking kid. Tell her you were kidnapped!!!

An odd note, the little sister is named Gabbi. The author’s name is Gabrielle. I find it rather odd to name a character after yourself.

Oh yea, so the mystery. His Dad caught some weird brain virus and died. Not that he seems to have been isolated at all. Or cremated. Really? No fear this weird virus you know nothing about is going to spread to other people?

And there’s an Ormond Riddle, Ormond Angel, Ormond Singularity thing. Ormond is their last name. Don’t expect to ever find out what that’s all about, because as you may have guessed, there’s 12 of these books. In fact, this book ends in a really bad place and with no sense of closure whatsoever. It’s a good thing I don’t care at all, because I’m totally not reading the other books.

This would make better television than prose, as there’s a lot, a lot of action, but even so, I wouldn’t be at all interested in watching it. And it would still be unbelievable on several counts.

Next!