WHILE I LIVE

Marsden’s bestselling and award-winning Tomorrow series ended with the invasion of Australia resolved in a truce, and teen Ellie and her friends stopping their guerrilla fighting to return home. Ellie’s story continues in a new series, which opens with Ellie’s life in post-war Australia. It’s surreal for Ellie, former outback rebel, to be an everyday teenager living with her parents and attending school in a country desperately striving for normalcy. Interestingly, the fragile status quo doesn’t quite shatter when Ellie’s parents are killed in a horrifying cross-border raid. Instead, Ellie is drawn into increasingly desperate measures to save her family farm and protect the near-feral orphan she adopted during the war. It’s almost a relief when she turns from these everyday nightmares to the more comprehensible (to Ellie) terrors of underground combat. Ellie’s grief is palpable and heartbreaking, and Marsden’s always talented touch for constructing combat tensions is brilliantly balanced here with Ellie’s need to live in a recovering world. (Fiction. YA)