Darkness, Be my Friend - Review
Uploaded by Ethan on Jan 22, 1999
Darkness, Be My Friend is the fourth book in John Marsden's series consisting of Tomorrow, When the War Began, In the Dead of the Night and The Third Day, The Frost, in which seven young people are thrown into the middle of a violent war zone. Ellie, Fi, Kevin, Lee, Homer, Robyn and Corrie set out on a camping trip to a remote part of their district. They find their way into a remote basin surrounded by dangerous cliffs and difficult terrain, where they are completely safe and cut off from the rest of the world. When the teenagers return to their homes, they find that all the families in the district were abducted and locked into the show grounds by armed soldiers who are taking over Australia. After finding this, they go on to perform numerous terrorist activities around the district to hamper the enemy's progress. These including blowing up a bridge on a major convoy route, attacking an important bay used for supplies and in Darkness, Be My Friend, the teenagers set out from New Zealand to assist a small group of elite New Zealand soldiers attack the new airbase that has been built in their town. In this book, the New Zealand soldiers disappear without a trace and the teenagers have to attack the airbase themsleves...
I think that this book is as much about adventure and survival as it is about emotions, friendships and relationships. The book is written as the diary of the unofficial leader of the group and she speaks a lot about her thoughts, her relationships with the other members of the group and of her emotions about what she was forced to do during the course of the war.
"I was determined I wasn't going to get angry, so I ignored that. I didn't blame him in a way. If only I could have understood what was going on in my own mind... but I found that difficult at the best of times."
"It was nothing to do with Lee. I still liked him a lot. I'd got over those feelings I'd had ages ago, the negative feelings towards him. So it wasn't that. I thought maybe it had something to do with the boy in New Zealand, whose name I realised with a shock I'd forgotten. It would come back to me, no doubt about that, but for the moment I couldn't think of...