My favourite book

“Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.”

For me, that's Tomorrow, When the War Began. Not just the first book, but the whole series. I was twelve when I first started reading. I remember staying up late to read it, reading it at recess, and on my lap under the desk.

Apart from Summer Heights High, which I will forever consider the most accurate representation of Australian schooling/teenage life, the Tomorrow Series had the characters that I always most identified with, who gave me the most nuggets of truth about life. It set my value system, I can't explain it better. Ellie, the protagonist, she is the most well rounded character I've ever read.

She's incredibly brave and selfless, but she is also stubborn and pig headed, and like everyone, she can be lazy and selfish and mean and thoughtless and cruel and bitter. She makes bad decisions and wrong decisions and she's so real to me. To compare her to the protagonist in the Hunger Games, she is what I consider the humanised version of Katniss. She is a Katniss who is not naively unaware of the feelings of people around her-- though of course she isn't a mindreader-- and she spends a lot of time thinking about her feelings and her actions. She is a Katniss who is not uninterested in romance and sex and relationships. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with Katniss for being written like that. There are obvious differences between their lives, Ellie is a 'normal', well looked after teenager. Her tragedies and ordeals are terrible and her story is about survival and making terrible decisions and having to live with them, and are similar in that both characters deal with PTSD and the aftereffects of their decisions, but where Katniss has dealt with survival all her life, and has developed a single-mindedness to protecting her sister, and mother to an extent, Ellie's loyalties are spread amongst her loved ones, her friends, family, people she meets, her town and her country. I feel like Ellie lives. She breathes. Her life occurs through the pages, not just when she is running for her life, but through every joke, every conversation and argument and touch, she creates this breathing organism of life around her. The author, through Ellie, makes a world that exists not just when an action is significant to the plot.

     "Exactly. You do understand! We have to do things that say yes, not just things that say no. Planting all those seeds, that was a good thing to do. But we should have planted flowers too. The Herit understood that. That's why he put in those roses, and when he made that bridge he didn't just shove a few logs cross the creed. He made it beautifully, so it'll last hundreds of years. We have to create things, and think in the long term. Leave stuff behind us for other. Life rules! Yeah!"

    And I leapt away and did a dance through the Hermit's dark little house, coming back with dozens of rose petals that I scattered generously on Lee's face. But that wasn't enough. I'd suddenly built up so much energy that I could have planted a thousand trees, kissed a thousand guys, built a thousand houses. Instead I ploughed my way back down the crease at high speed, ran in zigzags through the clearing, then jogged on up the track to watch the sunset prom Satan's Steps.

I just chose that from a random page I opened to, but do you see what I mean when I say Ellie lives? She has this incredible agency, that she exists to make surprising choices, to do what feels right to her alone. In the Tomorrow Series, plot never drives the story, the characters do and it makes me feel so passionate about it, because Ellie feels so real, I do see her as a real role model. That's why my first girl child will be 'Ellie', provided my partner agrees. I want my child to grow up with Ellie too. To learn from her how important it is to be yourself, to stand up for what you believe in, to be there for your friends and to be brave and kind.

I love Ellie in a way that I don't love Katniss because she was more relatable. She doesn't make you feel bad for not being strong every second, for not being thoughtlessly selfless. And I liked that Ellie was  definitively a female character, with female traits. A feminist issue I don't always know where I fall on 'are there real differences between genders?', but Ellie isn't a man with a female name, and it's not that she's emotional where the boys are stoic, or she's superficial or gossips or wants love, maybe it's just that she reminds me more of me, I see more of myself in her, than I ever have in any other person or character. Maybe it's just a skill of the writing, and that our personalities are similar, that I insert myself into her shoes and that makes her more female to me, but I do think it's more than that. Marsden respects that women/ girls communicate differently, that friendship is different, that relationships are approached differently and it's true, those differences are real. However, that doesn't make that the girl characters are cut from one cutout and the boys another, every characters is so well fleshed out, I find myself in all of them, my friends in all of them. Bits and pieces from all of them, gender aside.

I can't explain it better, but everyone should read that series at least once. I'm feeling sad that I am, in a way, outgrowing the series in that, the writing is coming across to me as more YA, and being out of high school, I feel I relate to things differently to Ellie now. I think its perfect for anyone from 12-18, but still good after that, just not an exact fit. Like the quote I started with, the emotional place you are in when you first read something, if it's right, it does stick with you. It does change you and shape you and that's so amazing.