The next morning, the other four teens return from their recon mission in Wirrawee.

Ellie has a moment of wondering where her line is again when she realizes Chris brought cigarettes and booze back with him, because…kind of a weird thing to get stuck on. Reminds me of the running theme of the characters operating from a ‘peacetime’ mindset and only changing their priorities for the really big, obvious things like murder. Let the guy have some stress relief, I’m sure the original owner of those cigarettes won’t mind. Or notice.

But then Robyn has everyone sit down so she can relate the last several days to us in spoken summary, because this book is nothing but summaries. You want to see cool stuff happen on page? NOPE, TOO BAD, HAVE A SUMMARY INSTEAD.

What we said jokingly a while back is quite true: they have got plenty of food. They’ve eaten the scones, the decorated cakes, the sponges, the home-made bread, the matched eggs, the novelty cakes

…the fair was stocked to feed people for the duration of the faire. You’ve added MORE people and kept them past the planned duration. Why do you think that the fact they had food at the faire means they’ll be fine in perpetuity?

They do mention that they’ve been eating the livestock, which probably has lasted them longer than the cake, and they’ve been sending small parties out in town to get more food. So, good. I’m leery of how effective this is when they’ve had to feed an army as well and also they didn’t even start this for like a week or more, but at least there’s an attempt to justify things.

Robyn mentions that there’s other groups resisting the invasion with guerilla style tactics, but they’re pretty small and the invaders seem confident that it’s all under control. They’re more or less treating people well.

For a given definition of ‘well,’ which according to this book means keeping everyone locked up in a small area, densely packed, probably literally standing in shit at this point because, really, this port-a-johns aren’t going to last for very long.

The people we’ve talked to say the soldiers are anxious to keep their noses clean. They know that sooner or later the United Nations and the Red Cross’ll be wandering around, and they don’t want to attract a lot of heat from them. They keep talking about a “clean” invasion. They figure that if there’s no talk of concentration camps and torture and rape and stuff, there’s less chance of countries like America getting involved.

YOU CANNOT KEEP MASSES OF PEOPLE LOCKED IN A TINY GEOGRAPHIC AREA AND NOT HAVE ATROCITIES HAPPEN. I mean, at the very least, there’s got to be some displays of force going on to keep people from revolting.

Oh, also, it’s already a concentration camp, so what the fuck do you think that means, book?

He said they’re going to colonise the whole country with their own people, and all the farms will be split up between them, and we’ll just be allowed to do menial jobs, like cleaning lavatories I suppose.

Invasion fantasies are just white people being afraid that someone else is going to do what they did, but to them.

Anyway, so the crux of Robyn’s story is that they ran across one of the work groups going through houses, and they managed to talk to the group while they were working. They groups were ‘clearing out moldy food and dead pets to make them habitable again’ and also ‘gathering valuables like jewelry.’

Do these invaders have diamond-powered jets or something, because the jewelry obsession is really getting to me.

OMG reading through Robyn’s description of almost getting caught by a soldier is SO BORING. It should be tense, but it’s not, because it’s this fucking wall of text and told to us in a person’s regular vernacular instead of seeing it real time with narration. Instead of feeling tense, my eyes are glazing over.

They go down to the highway to the nearby Bay and see it’s being heavily used because the army is brining supplies in by ship and then trucking it to town.

“But Whitley,” you say. “Doesn’t that assuage your concerns about supplies? Ships can bring lots of supplies!”

Sure, but consider this: ARMIES USE LOTS OF SUPPLIES, TOO. These people shouldn’t be giving up cargo space to food when they could be, ya know, just not letting the food on the ground rot.

I’m going to complain about food until I see some numbers, which I won’t, because this book doesn’t actually care about that, it just throws out some vague ‘food exists’ and assumes it all works out. Which I’d be more fine with if the book hadn’t primed my pump with all the abandoned homestead nonsense. There’s a lot you can leave unsaid if you just don’t shoot yourself in the foot first. This book cared about the atmosphere of an abandoned town more than it cared about the actual invasion, and then it tried to come in afterwards and patch up the plot hole. Patches so rarely work like that.

One had forty vehicles and the other had twenty-nine. So it’s doing big business, for a little old rural road.

Sorry, you don’t have a road anymore. You have a series of potholes.

And the fairgrounds are extra fortified, and that’s all the information we’ve got for this recon.

Homer declares that they have three options: bunker down and wait it out, do a suicide run on the Showgrounds, or try to guerilla it up.

There’s other things we could do too of course, other options, like moving somewhere else, or surrendering, but they’re so remote I don’t think they’re worth discussing

1) Why do you think moving is only a remote possibility? 2) If you go for the fuck shit up approach, moving is a big part of that, and shouldn’t you be trying to meet up with your own army or any resistance in order to be effective?

I mean, I would think organizing whoever is left would be a pretty big priority if your end goal is resistance.

Despite what these people say about a “clean” invasion, I think all wars are filthy and foul and rotten. There was nothing clean about them blowing up Corrie’s house, or killing the Francis family. I know this might sound a bit different from what I said before, but I don’t think it is. I can understand why these people have invaded but I don’t like what they’re doing

I mean, I’ve said it before that invasion fantasies are just ‘but what if they do what we did,’ but… The whole ‘clean’ invasion idea feels like another layer on top of that. Like, this book can’t envision how things might go down differently from another culture, there’s only the ‘white style’ invasion in mind, but also there’s this attempt to clean up the atrocities associated with that?

“We’re afraid you might do what we did, but also, what we did wasn’t so bad, right?”

There’s a lot of monologues and then the actual back-and-forth discussion is reduced to a summary (of course) but they reluctantly land on ‘do something’ and then specifically on ‘do something about that highway.’

Guys, I already told you, don’t worry about. It’s all potholes by now anyway.