Tomorrow’s Everlasting Love – Book Review

I’ve just replanted a very lack-lustre Frangipani called Everlasting Love. My husband gave it to me for our 9th anniversary and it was such a beautiful vibrant plant with tiny white flowers and smudges of yellow in the centre. I thought at the time the odds were against this plant surviving in a climate other than its native Queensland. It showed no signs of fading…that was until our coldest and wettest winter ever hit!

As I was digging its new home (grave,) I thought about the book I have just finished and how everlasting love drove these teenagers to survive and ultimately fight back.  There are many ways of expressing love and experiencing love, but one of the most enduring and poignant loves is the love a parent feels for their child. From the second they squirm into your hands at birth, it is a love that most parents feel to the very core. As this affection filtrates into the growing child, that love is more often than not reciprocated.

Tomorrow, When The War Began (my latest read) was engulfed in a few reading sessions. I’ve always had a fascination with books that pose the “what if the unthinkable happened?

John Marsden draws you in with an initial adventure and chatty teenage dialogue. However he sows the seed for conflict and change when he drops in present tense comments and alludes to characters changing and happiness being an emotion the narrator, Ellie, is now void of.

The story is about the world changing forever, but everlasting love and hope for a reunion with their parents helps the teenagers to develop strategies to survive and later take on the evil forces at work.

Tomorrow, When The War Began tackles themes of loneliness, trust and intuition. It forges friendships and relationships and exposes the courage and vulnerability of humans and the ability to snap into action, at whatever cost.

‘Hell’ is a mysterious and rugged bush land and Marsden’s descriptions of nature give one a sense of its density and remoteness.  He personifies the creek: “just chattered on, minding it’s own business’ and the track that “brought us cunningly into the bowl”. He manages to turn this eerie landscape into an eventual safe haven.

Marsden subtly mentions several famous novels about adventure, disaster, or the forbidden, including: The Famous Five and Secret Seven; Z for Zachariah; Heart of Darkness; My Brilliant Career; The Scarlet Letter; and Fallen Angels. This gives the book a realistic edge and the reader feels as though Australia really is in trouble.

Once the war begins, the reader is held captive by the seriousness of the situation. Blood is shed, lives are lost and teenagers who should be enjoying just being teenagers are thrust into the jaws of war.

Tomorrow, When The War Began, is a testament to the teenagers’ everlasting love for their families, friends, community and country. It is a must-read YA novel for anyone who doubts the possibility of war on one’s own soil.