Module 5: Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta

Book Summary: Taylor Markham was abandoned at a gas station when she was eleven years old. Since then she has lived and gone to the school on Jellicoe Road. The only adult she trusts is Hannah, who is a caretaker on the school grounds. Every year there is a territory war between the Jellicoe Road school kids, the Townies, and the Cadets. The leader of the Cadets, is Jonah Griggs, the boy that ran away with her when she was fourteen. It's during the territory war this year that Taylor begins to uncover her secrets, as well as Hannah's and Jonah's, and how they all come together in a beautiful, heartbreaking way.

APA Citation: Marchetta, M. (2010). Jellicoe road. New York, NY: HarperTeen.

Impressions: This book is near impossible for me to review because I absolutely love it. As a writer, I found it both inspiring and hard to read because I want to write something this powerful and beautiful while at the same time I kept thinking "I'm never going to write something this amazing".

Let me break down a few of the many things I loved about it:

The setting: Jellicoe Road is set up for the reader from the first page. It's beautiful and wild and contains mysteries and secrets. The school is home to misfits and delinquents, children and teens that are trying to make a home for themselves with people that feel as alone as they do. This little slice of a fictional Australian town is a place that I want to visit but also feel like I have visited before. There are parts of it that are in different places I've lived and visited. For example, the road that led to my grandfather's house was lined with trees and felt wild and like home, just like the Jellicoe Road. And yet at the same time, the town and road feel like places that I will never be able to find because they can't exist without the characters that live in them.

The characters: Taylor Markham, Jonah Griggs, Raffy, Hannah, Webb, Tate, Jude, Fitz, all of them. They all taught me different ways that people show their love and fear. I found parts of myself in Taylor, especially her trust issues and first instinct of putting up a barrier between herself and others. At times it was even uncomfortable reading from her point of view because things about her that friends didn't like while reading it were the same things I saw in myself.

The plot: The beginning was very confusing. I wasn't sure of what was going on or even when it was set. The territory "war" had me questioning if the book was contemporary fiction or dystopian. I loved going into the book not knowing anything, though, because it all made sense. Even the confusion makes sense because of all of the layers of the mysteries and secrets that Taylor uncovers around her. There is mystery, romance, humor, all things I look for in a book. The plot of discovering what Taylor's past was and how the other characters played a part in where she is at, had me unable to put the book down.

The writing: It was almost lyrical at times. I have so many quotations written down that I love and I'll find myself turning to certain scenes just to read them over again. As mentioned earlier, the beginning is confusing, but Melina Marchetta purposely makes each decision and choice for how it is written and why. It's only when you have finished the book that the reader discovers the reasons.

Professional Review: Just when Taylor’s only guardian, Hannah, disappears from the Jellicoe School campus, she must lead her classmates in secret war games against neighboring locals (Townies) and a camp of military kids (Cadets). While the gripping boundary battles among the three factions raise the reader’s pulse, Taylor’s search for Hannah and her relationship with Jonah, the stoic cadet commander, charge the story with unwavering intrigue. Taylor reads Hannah’s autobiographical manuscript for clues and finds surprising links to her own life: Jellicoe students, cadets, war games and even Taylor’s long-absent, drug-addicted mother all surface in the book, which recounts events 22 years old. Marchetta plows into a complicated story line head first, shifting between Hannah’s narrative and Taylor’s trials as Jellicoe School’s war commander. Time flashes forward and back, histories bleed together and two generations of friends bear uncanny resemblances to one another. Readers may feel dizzied and disoriented, but as they puzzle out exactly how Hannah’s narrative connects with Taylor’s current reality, they will find themselves ensnared in the story’s fascinating, intricate structure. A beautifully rendered mystery. (Fiction. 14 & up)

Kirkus Reviews. (2010). [Review of the book Jellicoe road by M. Marchetta]. Kirkus reviews. Retrieved February 23, 2015 from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/melina-marchetta/jellicoe-road/.

Library Uses: This would be a great book to have as part of a Young Adult Book Club choice. It lends to several discussion points about writing style, mental disorders, abandonment, different forms of love, etc.