Jellicoe Road

Marchetta, Melina. Jellicoe Road.  New York: HarperCollins, 2006. 419 p. eBook.

 

Abandonment issues don’t begin to describe the issues that haunt Taylor Markham’s dreams.  Left at a 7-11 when she was eleven, Taylor has been living in a boarding school for the last seven years.  Her closest adult figure is a very aloof Hannah, who recently disappeared without a trace.  On top of Hannah’s betrayal, Taylor has to deal with being the unwilling leader of the school’s underground society and having to deal with the annual war games played between the Townies, the visiting military group known as The Cadets, and the Jellicoe School that Taylor calls home.  As the weeks go on talk of a serial killer, Taylor’s mother, and the history of a group of five kids that changed Taylor’s very existence begins to unfold.  The more answers that surface, the more questions come to light, and it seems as though no one can rest until all is revealed, once and for all.

Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta is certainly one of those books that gets under a reader’s skin and nestles itself into the very fiber.  Taylor Markham is a teenager who is hard to love. She is aloof and hostile and clearly wounded.  She ends up with a ragtag group of friends whom the reader wants to love and throttle, usually at the same time.  The core strength of the novel is the intricate web that Marchetta weaves around Taylor and her gang, and a whole other group of kids from the past… a group that has a lot of secrets that need to be uncovered.  The reader has moments of “I just knew it” only to find out that the reader only knew a miniscule piece of something much, much bigger and hidden deeper in the past.  Certainly a weakness from the book is the confusing set up that leaves the reader quite befuddled for the first few chapters.  The chapters in italics, a clear indicator that it is something different than the current-day Taylor story, are not truly revealed until well into the book.  A reader can feel just as confused as our protagonist, though surely that is not an unintentional fluke.  Perhaps to truly appreciate the story that untangles itself in Jellicoe Road, it is first important to be just as tangled up in it as the characters themselves.

For a YA reader, Jellicoe Road delivers a hard hitting story, filled with emotions that are very real to most teens: confusion, a yearning for acceptance, and a desire to know what the universe has in store.  The book takes readers on a journey that was twenty years in the making, and it has the travelers stop and wonder if maybe it would just be better to let history keep its own secrets. But, of course, we know that history has its own agenda.