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.
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.
Jellicoe Road is really two stories in one: the events of twenty-two years ago (it says eighteen in the description because the people in the "B" plotline age about four years throughout the novel) and how they affected five friends, and the senior year of Taylor Markham, who has a new position of power in the Territory Wars at her boarding school. The stories intertwine (through a manuscript that Taylor has read) and eventually intersect in ways that would seem pat in the hands of a lesser author. Marchetta does wonderful things with all the characters, even secondary and tertiary ones. Even characters that never appear on the scene, and are only mentioned by other characters, are imbued with personality, like Jonah's mother and brother.
This is one of the most fantastic books I've read. It starts out slow, as Marchetta sets out the threads of all the story lines, but as you get further into the two time lines, you begin to match up events and people, so that by the end of the book, you immediately want to re-read it, just so you can lengthen that "Aha!" moment. I freely admit that I was sobbing straight through the last third of the book the first time I read it, and the whole way through the second time.
It's a complex book, in that you really are sort of given a lot of pieces which don't fit together, until later events in the book put them into order and context. Sort of like Pulp Fiction, only about teenagers instead of gangsters. Marchetta is a master at spooling out details, things that seem insignificant until they suddenly become very important. She does this in such a way that although you may not take very much notice of this or that small detail, when the revelations come, you remember what came before very clearly - so that the process of piecing these stories together isn't a strain on your memory or patience. Which is all the more impressive because I have a terrible memory, so managing to make seemingly irrelevant details memorable is quite a feat.
Marchetta has always been one of my favorite authors in terms of what she understands about teenage girls, and she manages to get humor, sorrow, love, action, romance, and mystery all packed in, without being melodramatic or overbearing. Or well, it is melodramatic, but only in that teen angst, my-whole-world-is-splitting-apart-and-no-one-even-realizes-it kind of way. In Marchetta's hands, the unabashed rawness of the emotion is both thrilling and terrifying.
I am kind of a sucker for this type of book (if it is a "type" and not just some one-off description) where people love each other so much, but it's still not enough to keep out sorrow and pain, and the characters just have to find a way to manage the pain and find the joy in life. Actually, that's what most of Marchetta's books are about - the equivalent of her characters all ending the books singing, "I get by with a little help from my friends". And there's no need to sneer, finding out you're not alone can be the best feeling in the world.
How do I feel by the end of the day
(Are you sad because you're on your own)
No, I get by with a little help from my friends.
Do you need anybody?
I need somebody to love.
Could it be anybody?
I want somebody to love.
Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends.
Mmm, gonna try with a little help from my friends.
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