Darkness, Be My Pal is the fourth book in John Marsden’s series consisting of Tomorrow, When the War Started, 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 aspect of their district. They uncover their way into a remote basin surrounded by unsafe cliffs and complicated terrain, exactly where they are entirely protected and reduce off from the rest of the globe. When the teenagers return to their houses, they obtain that all the households in the district were abducted and locked into the show grounds by armed soldiers who are taking more than Australia. Right after discovering this, they go on to perform various terrorist activities around the district to hamper the enemy’s progress. These including blowing up a bridge on a key convoy route, attacking an essential bay utilized for supplies and in Darkness, Be My Buddy, the teenagers set out from New Zealand to assist a small group of elite New Zealand soldiers attack the new airbase that has been constructed in their town. In this book, the New Zealand soldiers disappear with out a trace and the teenagers have to attack the airbase themsleves…
I believe that this book is as considerably 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 feelings 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 thoughts… but I discovered that hard at the best of instances.”
“It was nothing to do with Lee. I nevertheless liked him a lot. I’d got more than those feelings I’d had ages ago, the negative feelings towards him. So it wasn’t that. I thought perhaps it had anything 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 could not think of…