Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta
“What do you want from me?” he asks. What I want from every person in my life, I want to tell him. More.
Abandoned by her mother on Jellicoe Road when she was eleven, Taylor Markham, now seventeen, is finally being confronted with her past. But as the reluctant leader of her boarding school dorm, there isn’t a lot of time for introspection. And while Hannah, the closest adult Taylor has to family, has disappeared, Jonah Griggs is back in town, moody stares and all.
In this absorbing story by Melina Marchetta, nothing is as it seems and every clue leads to more questions as Taylor tries to work out the connection between her mother dumping her, Hannah finding her then and her sudden departure now, a mysterious stranger who once whispered something in her ear, a boy in her dreams, five kids who lived on Jellicoe Road eighteen years ago, and the maddening and magnetic Jonah Griggs, who knows her better than she thinks he does. If Taylor can put together the pieces of her past, she might just be able to change her future.
This book was so good! The two storylines were a little confusing at first, but it didn’t take that long for me to get into it. Maybe 80 pages or so. Once I was into it, there was no putting it down.
The characters in the book were so easy to fall in love with. I loved Taylor so much. She was strong yet vulnerable. The other characters were so great – Griggs, Santangelo, Rafaela, Ben, Jessa – I grew to love them all!
The descriptions in the book were also fantastic. I really felt like I was in a small town in Australia. I kept thinking that the turf wars were silly and unimportant, but the more I read, the more I cared. It was just that good. I figured out pretty quickly how the stories connected, but the reveals were just beautiful.
The only thing that is keeping me from giving this book 5 stars is the disjointedness of the beginning. I understand why it was like that, but it made it kind of hard to get started.
