Review: Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta

Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta

Published: 2008, HarperTeen

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary
Source: Library book

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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.