The Third Day, The Frost (The Tomorrow Series) by John Marsden
| The Third Day, The Frost (The Tomorrow Series) by John Marsden | |
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| Category: Teens | |
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Reviewer: Robert James
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| Summary: The third in John Marsden's Tomorrow series is another bleak read which is perhaps overly reliant on the action scenes, but has an incredibly powerful ending which left me looking forward to book four. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 288 | Date: April 2012 |
| Publisher: Quercus | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-0857388759 | |
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Warning: This review contains spoilers for the first two books in the Tomorrow series, Tomorrow When the War Began and The Dead of Night.
Narrator Ellie and her friends are carrying on with their resistance efforts against the invaders and hit on a stroke of luck as they discover their old comrade Kevin working on a nearby farm. A daring rescue attempt succeeds, and he's brought back into the fold. He's also learnt something of explosives, and is able to help plan the group's most audacious attack yet. But with security higher than ever, can they pull it off, and at what cost?
The third in this series has Marsden's usual well-described scenes, clever plotting, and great dialogue. The romance which was so well-developed in the first two books seems to have faded by now, but that's treated as a realistic consequence of the lives the characters have been leading. The set pieces are individually as impressive as ever, but that said, I felt like I was suffering from action fatigue when reading this. There's just so many long sequences coming one after another that they actually get fairly boring. For me, the first two were successful because they had really strong characterisation and the way the teens fell into carrying out some really destructive acts in an effort to fight back was vividly portrayed. In this one, we don't seem to get as much of that development until the end. In addition, like The Dead of the Night, it's a bleak read with relatively few moments of triumph for our heroes.
In fairness to Marsden though, it's a stunning, absolutely breaktaking ending once we get to it. Hugely powerful, it changes things significantly and has got me really excited for book four in the series. The strength of the climax lifts it into recommended territory, and the series as a whole is still definitely worth checking out, it's just not quite lived up to my sky high expectations after the initial book.
I think fans of this series would really like How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, another tale of youngsters trying to survive a war without any adults left to take care of them.
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You can read more book reviews or buy The Third Day, The Frost (The Tomorrow Series) by John Marsden at Amazon.com.
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