Jellicoe Road by Melina
Marchetta
Published: 2008, HarperTeen
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary
Source: Library book
So I go back to the
stories I’ve read about the five and I try to make sense of their lives because
in making sense of theirs, I may understand mine.
Melina Marchetta has done it
again for me. I read Finnikin of the Rock in January and, although it
took me a little while to really get into the book, it is one of the best books
I've read so far this year. I started reading Jellicoe Road with
somewhat high expectations because of that. I did need a similar adjustment
period to really get into Jellicoe Road (and perhaps it was a little
longer simply because contemporary fiction is not my preferred genre and the
beginning is tough to figure out), but it was definitely worth my time and
maybe, just maybe, made me realize that not all contemporary YA fiction is bad,
that some can actually be quite good.
Jellicoe Road holds many
memories for Taylor Markham. She was abandoned by her mother at a convenience store
alongside the road when she was eleven. She was then taken in by Hannah, who
becomes her mentor, and raised at the boarding school just down the road for
state wards, troubled children, and a few delinquents. It is now the holiday
season before Taylor's senior year at school and she has been appointed the
leader of school in the annual territory war fought between school children,
townies, and cadets each September. And then Hannah abruptly leaves, and Taylor
finds out that the cadet leader is Jonah Griggs, a boy she got to know a few
years ago when she first went searching for her mother. Add in the fact that
Taylor keeps dreaming about a boy and his friends who lived on the Jellicoe
Road twenty years ago and now things have gotten just a little complicated.
Taylor has been a
virtual orphan for nearly half her life, so it is her relationships with her
friends that define her more than anything else. Ever since Taylor’s mother
abandoned her, Hannah has been there for Taylor, giving her a place at the school
and looking out for her. My first reading did not give me quite the
understanding of Hannah that I would have liked (she is absent for the large
majority of the book), but through my second reading I really was able to
appreciate her character more. Besides Hannah, Taylor does not really have
anyone she can rely upon. She closes herself off from others and even lashes
out occasionally. Taylor doesn’t know how to deal with her memories or what she
wants from life.
Enter Raffy, Santangelo, and
Jonah Griggs. Although they all come from different backgrounds (Raffy is from
Taylor’s house at school but grew up in the town, Santangelo is a townie, and
Griggs is a cadet), the three of them form a friendship with Taylor, not unlike
the one formed between the five children of the past. And through them,
Taylor’s able to learn to trust others and open up just a little bit more. I
especially loved Griggs’ relationship with Taylor. They first meet at a train
station when Taylor was fourteen and decided to leave school to find her
mother. And now they meet again as ostensible enemy leaders in the territory
wars. Although it is tragic how broken both of them are, their relationship is
nothing but positive. Instead of bringing each other down, they begin to heal themselves
by healing the other. Yes, attraction is part of their relationship, but that's
not the focus. There's just something beautiful about them struggling with
personal insecurities and using their own pain to help each other.
Although Taylor is the
protagonist and the book mostly follows her perspective, there are occasional
interruptions from the novel's main storyline. The secondary storyline follows
the lives of five children who also once called Jellicoe Road home: Tate, Webb,
Narnie, Fitz, and Jude. I'm not going to lie - at first I had no idea what the
point of this secondary storyline was, or why I should care about these kids.
Once I did start figuring out the importance of the secondary storyline and its
characters, I enjoyed, like Taylor, trying to piece together bits of the past
to see how they affected her present day. The story about the five children is
so poignant, and I belatedly wished for even more scenes between the children.
Even after finishing the book, however, I still had some difficulty remembering
the specific characterizations of each child. Because I spent so much time
reading these sections and not fully understanding them, this book is
definitely worth future rereads. The secondary storyline becomes critical to
Taylor's future narrative, and tons of information from these sections that
simply went over my head during my first reading.
While reading this book, I found
myself asking a lot of hard questions about humans and human behavior, none
that are easily answerable in the book or in real life. I loved that! I love it
when I can get so into a book that many of its themes do start intermingling
with my real life. I think it's the mark of great skill on the author's part.
All of Marchetta's characters are so flawed, so human. They each have their
fair share of mistakes, and in many ways the book shows readers how Taylor and
company are able to look past the bad faults and see how people are so much
more complicated, that the simple sum of their actions still is not enough to
fully understand one another.
Jellicoe Road is not quite the light read I was
expecting, but that's not a bad thing by any means. It was a thought-provoking
look at the common YA theme of self-discovery. Beautifully written, beautifully
told. Definitely worth a read (and, for people like me who like to be able to
put everything together and understand as much as possible, at least one
additional reread).
A Note: It took me a
very long time to think of anything to write for this review. And then once I
did, I wasn’t sure I had really even begun to capture what the story was about.
So I reread it and edited my review. Definitely a complex book, but probably
the best contemporary YA book I’ve ever read.
