Project Tomorrow: The Ellie Chronicles – While I Live

While I Live by John Marsden
Series: The Ellie Chronicles
Published by Pan Australia
Published on November 1st 2003
Pages: 300
Add to Goodreads
Buy from Amazon

"We were halfway up the spur when we heard it. Homer and Gavin and I, just the three of us... I'd say there were fifteen shots in the first volley, evenly spaced, lasting about twenty-five seconds... All the way down the spur I'd heard the scattered shots, getting closer as I got closer, and all the way down I tried to think of reasonable explanations for them, and I couldn't think of a single thing that made sense."

The town of Wirrawee is emerging from war, slowly, like a flower after a cold snap. Businesses are starting to reopen, the school has re-commenced classes, and local farmers are gradually repossessing their land. But it's not the same Australia as before the war. A new nation exists just a few miles away, a new border that separates Australia from its invaders. Or does it?

For Ellie Linton, being back on the farm with her parents is what makes the terrible things that happened during the war – the things she, Homer, Lee, Fi and the others had to do – all worthwhile. It's where she belongs.

But the war won't let her go. A devastating tragedy has shattered any hope she ever had to reclaim her life, or herself. It's a new kind of fight. And the enemy isn't always from the other side of the border.

Life after the war is already tough enough – Ellie’s farm has been split into five and distributed among the new settlers. It’s right on the border of the new country, and when her parents are brutally murdered, Ellie is left to fend for herself and Gavin and is at risk of losing the farm. But that’s not all – when the border tussles spill over into her life, Ellie will need all the skills she’s learned during war time to save people she loves.

The Ellie Chronicles is quite a good companion novel to the Tomorrow series. It’s not even been six months since the war was declared over, but Ellie was happy with her life – going to school, helping her dad on the farm, looking after her mum. But when she becomes an orphan and suddenly has to grow up a whole lot – still as a legal minor – life becomes much tougher. She has to make adult decisions like whether to trust her lawyer, which stock to buy and how much when she’s suddenly in massive financial debt, whether to attend school or race off on a death-defying mission to rescue her friends.

I was a bit concerned at first because it seemed like a lot of the first part of the novel was condensing the story – the entire section about Ellie’s parents funeral is told, not shown, but with good reason: Ellie doesn’t remember lots of it. It was interesting watching her learn to run a farm on her own (because rural life is so different to the city life I know), but I was glad when we got back into the guerrilla let’s-explode-things let’s-shoot-bad-guys familiar rhythm of the original series. The action parts were always what sold the original series and this is no exception. Ellie is one BAMF.

But I was thrown completely out of the loop when afterwards, Ellie is having this existential crisis, and there’s a page of uninterrupted free-flowing stream of consciousness, and for some reason she starts thinking about her mother’s ‘brown nipples’ and her father’s penis ‘with the curious head’ and their pubic hair and I’m just like what

what

what

what

What the fuck did I just read.

In a book where Ellie doesn’t even have sex, although she thinks about it with Lee (of course), this just seemed so out of place. Like Marsden was writing some other story and accidentally opened the wrong file.

Obviously it was really jarring and had no place in this book, even though this book is more grown up than the Tomorrow series. In the Tomorrow series, it was hinted a few times that the enemy soldiers wanted to rape Fi, and I think Ellie was threatened once or twice. Well, in this book, someone actually is raped by the enemy. That’s the difference between this and Tomorrow. This book is more grown up. Ellie is facing adult decisions as well as teen ones.

Apart from that totally weird few sentences on that one page, the book was really enjoyable. Familiar characters from the original series drop by or play a big role, and Gavin really comes into his own as Ellie’s foster brother. If you couldn’t get enough of the original series and were sad when it ended (although, you know, war is bad and stuff so yay it finally ended) then this spin-off will help show you what happened after, and how a country tries to pull itself together after being invaded.

Subscribe to Blog via Email