REVIEW: "Jellicoe Road"

When left to my own devices, I tend to spend hours at the library flipping from book jacket to book jacket in search of an intriguing read and, despite the age-old adage, will likely end up with a pretty cover and a lousy story.

Enter Mikala.  She is currently writing a young-adult fiction book, and as a means of studying her craft, she reads a lot.  (If you're interested, you can read about her latest experience at the 2012 Writer's Conference on her food-blog-turned-writing-blog here.)

Since we share the same taste in literature (more or less), I now have someone to weed out the good from the bad.  So once one story ends, I'm just a phone call away from my next read.  So far she hasn't let me down.  (So far.)  

Jellicoe Road was her latest recommendation.  

Source

Jellicoe Road is one of those books that loses you, and then grabs onto you tightly until you're on the verge of tears.  (I *may* have cried a little towards the end.)  It's not an action-packed thriller by any means.  It moves you through its endearing characters and their complicated relationships, which are both heartwarming and heartbreaking.

You should know going in that the first few chapters are rather disorienting (I had to reread them three times), and I now realize it's because the author provides practically no exposition.  And the little exposition she gives has no context.  She jumps freely between the past, the voice of the main character, and her dream, and then she throws out words like "Townies" and "Cadets" and instances like "the time the Hermit killed himself," and it's like we're expected to just know what she's talking about.

But we're not.  That's the idea.  We're supposed to catch just fragments of the story, like shaded, green puzzle pieces that are indistinct on their own, but once you start piecing them together, you realize they form the canopy of a tree.  That kind of thing.

Some of the fragmented storytelling made for a very interesting read.  Other parts I found to be unnecessary.  But everything reveals itself in the end, and the end is worth reaching, which is all that matters.

The story is about a seventeen-year old girl, Taylor Markam, who was abandoned at 7-Eleven by her mother at the age of 11.  At the beginning of the book, she is appointed the leader of her boarding school in what's known as the "Territory Wars" in which her school, the Townies (the kids from public school) and the Cadets (who set up camp in the area during the summer) fight for possession of certain territory.  It's meant to be a clandestine game, played out only at night and hidden from teachers and supervisors, but it often ends in insults and fist-fights.  Taylor's concentration on leading her school becomes hindered by two distractions - Hannah, her caregiver, disappears without a word and the leader of the Cadets turns out to be a mysterious boy from Taylor's past (cue romantic subplot).

Interspersed throughout this storyline are excerpts from a novel written by Hannah that she has left behind.  While these excerpts at first feel tangential in nature, they eventually become relevant to the main storyline and influential in the way Taylor comes to terms with her past and her future.

This book is very emotional, featuring a lot of "tortured" characters with tragic pasts.  I tend to get annoyed when characters just sit for long periods of time and wallow in their misery (I swear I wanted to shake Bella all throughout New Moon and tell her to just snap out of it and pull herself together).  But while Taylor exhibits her share of teen angst, these moments are understandable given her tragic past and help make her feel real.  Plus this is a young-adult book after all, and the author does a good job keeping these moments to a minimum.

Speaking of the author, Melina Marchetta is an award-winning young-adult writer who hails from Australia where she has quite the following.  Her writing style is heavy in dialogue and voice, and I was impressed by her ability to compact a lot of feeling into the shortest of passages.  For instance, the opening paragraph:

     My father took one-hundred and thirty-two minutes to die.
     I counted.
     It happened on the Jellicoe Road.  The prettiest road I'd ever seen, where trees made breezy canopies like a tunnel to Shangri-la.  We were going to the ocean, hundreds of miles away, because I wanted to see the ocean and my father said that it was about time to four of us made that journey.  I remember asking, "What's the difference between a trip and a journey?" and my father said, "Narnie, my love, when we get there, you'll understand," and that was the last thing he ever said.  

At this point, you don't know anything about Narnie or her father, but admit it, you feel a little sad right now.  It's only the first paragraph and you're already emotionally invested.

I recommend this book if you like sentimental stories about friendship, romance, and mysteries about people's pasts.  So mostly to girls.  If you can get past the confusion laid out in the first few chapters, it's definitely worth a read (and requisite re-reads to figure out what's going on in the beginning).

oo,