Book Review: Tomorrow, When the War Began

So, I had to take this reading class in high school where all you do is sit there and read, then the last ten minutes of class, you write about what you read so you can prove to the teacher that you read something.  I wish all classes worked this way.

They had a full bookshelf in the classroom, so I just picked up one of those books.  It was John Marsden's Tomorrow, When the War Began.  It's the first book in a seven or eight book young adult series called The Tomorrow Series.  I know, again with the young adult books!  But when I read this book, I was a young adult.  And I loved it.  It was my Harry Potter, before Harry Potter was written.  I breezed through probably four of the books, because they only had four of them in the classroom, but for some reason I never finished the series.

So a few weeks ago, I got the first one on my Kindle.  and then the second.  And now I'm reading the third book.  It's another one of those addicting little sets of books, except the characters are Australian and say Australian things and I even read the dialogue with an Australian accent in my mind.  Also, the first book was published in 1996, which I think was two years before Harry Potter, so it's not a "follower" series.  There's no witches or warlocks.  No vampires.

In the book, there is this group of high schoolers that goes camping in the bush, and while they are gone, their country is invaded and the small town where they are from is hit hard as a crucial part of the enemy's strategy.  Their families and neighbors are prisoners.  The book follows their actions after they realize there is a war in their own country.

The beginning of the first book is a bit slow, but it picks up when the war begins.  Also, there are several typos... At first, I thought it was because no one edited the kindle version, but I somewhat remember typos from the printed books I read in high school, although they may have just been the australian slang words that I didn't understand.  Despite the typos, I'm reading through this series like a hungry hyena.  

This whole time, I've been thinking "this book should be made into a movie."  Well, it was.  (Read the following sentence in a giddy little girl voice) It's a movie, it's a movie, it's a movie! But it's an Australian movie, so I just have to find it, somewhere out there.  I watched the trailer.  It looks like a bust, but I'm still going to hunt that sucker down and watch it.  Watch it like... like a... a hungry hyena.  What ever that means.