On the Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta

Just after the hermit committed suicide in front of her, Taylor took off to try and find her mother. Sometimes her life feels like a mystery that she can’t solve. She also dreams about a boy in a tree who knows things about her. But Taylor can’t remember what he told her, and she has other memory gaps as well. When she was fourteen, a hermit whispered something in her ear and then shot himself. Taylor enrolled in the Jellicoe School when she was thirteen. A woman named Hannah began taking care of her at that point, and Taylor suspects Hannah knows something about her mother, but whatever it is, Hannah won’t reveal it.

Taylor was abandoned by her mother in the bathroom of a 7-Eleven when she was just eleven years old. The heroine of the story, Taylor Markham, is a seventeen year old boarding school student at the Jellicoe School, which is about 600 kilometers from Sydney. I read Jellicoe Road for the TBR challenge because this month’s theme is “Tortured hero or tortured heroine,” and I had the sense that this book had its share of tortured characters.

At that point I bit the bullet and bought it in hardcover, a purchase that was worth every penny and then some. Then I heard that it won the American Library Association’s Printz Award. I first heard of this book here on the YA YA YAs blog. Yes, technically speaking Jellicoe Road was first published in 2006 (The Australian edition called On the Jellicoe Road), but the American edition came out in 2008, and it’s only been sitting in my TBR pile for a few months. Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, let me explain that when I picked up this book to read for Keishon’s TBR challenge, I was cheating a bit. It really isn’t fair of you to write a book that’s so beautiful and powerful that everything else pales in comparison. I put them all back down after a page or two. I tried one of my very favorite books from last year.

I tried a thought-provoking science fiction story. It’s your fault that your book, Jellicoe Road, left me so drained and dazed that I can’t read anything else. I’ve got a packed read-and-review schedule for the next month or so, and I need to be able to move from book to book. Janine A Review Category / A Reviews / Book Reviews Australia / good characterization / Good-Dialogue / good-narration / scarred-people / student / teen romance / traumatic-past / Young-Adult 54 Comments JREVIEW: Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta

On the Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta