love love loved this book! answered so many questions i had from the first book, finished in a day. can’t wait to finish the series

Marsden's When the War Began series was one of my favourites in high school - an intense 7 book series about a group of Australian teenagers who turn into guerillas after the invasion of their country, and capture of their families.

This is the second of those books, which I'm re-reading by listening to the audio versions. I quite like the woman who does the reading, apart from when she pronounced "foals" (as in baby horses) as "fowls" (as in chooks). Who doesn't know how to pronounce foal? It was in the context of a poem that's supposed to be terribly meaningful, so it threw me a little. I'm not sure that it's possible to write terribly meaningful teenage poetry about chooks.

Anyway, in The Dead of The Night, our heroes have lost two of their number, and spend a fair bit of time exploring around and seeing the impact of colonists moving into abandoned properties. They head further afield, and meet up with a group of survivors who've dubbed themselves 'Harvey's Heroes', something which has fairly terribly consequences for all involved.

I hadn't realised, or had forgotten, how much Ellie (the main character, whose diary writings form the narrative) annoys me - what I most dislike are the self-conscious high-school-essay musings on her attachment to her pen, or her friends' relationships with each other. I can't figure out whether this is a deliberate character choice, or just Marsden's idea of what teenage girls are like.

I think I was right in my review of the first of this series, Tomorrow When the War Began. I felt that one was good, but missing something.
This one, book 2, is much better. Much more action and much more character development helps to fill in the gaps from the first.

It's feeling much more like Red Dawn.

Marsden really has skill in writing in the voice of a teenaged girl. I'm impressed.

I have a feeling that I will devour the rest of the series pretty quickly.

Interesting. Now I have to go back and read the first in the series.