Module 5: Jellicoe Road, Michael L. Printz Award, 2007

Citation
Marchetta, M.  (2006).  Jellicoe Road.  New York: HarperTeen.


Summary
Jellicoe Road tells the story of boarding school student Taylor Markham, interspersed with snippets from the fragmented past of her guardian, Hannah Schroeder.  The novel, written by Australian Marchetta, ties together the present and past stories with abundant twists and turns.  The somber and tragic tone of the story is offset, at times, by dry teenage humor.  The mystery of Taylor's abandonment by her mother, somehow bound up with Hannah's own story, unravels through an adventure with her boyfriend, Jonah Griggs.  

Impression
This book very squarely falls into the category of young adult fiction, for its language, mild sexual content, and heavy -- and I mean heavy -- subject matter.  A horrific car wreck on Jellicoe Road results in the deaths of 5 people: two sets of parents and a sister.  The three surviving children form bonds with two other individuals, one who helped them out of the wreckage.  Depression, suicide, arson, and drug addiction (rendered sympathetically but with negative consequences) all comprise major elements of the plot.  A subplot involving a serial killer seemed a little over-the-top considering all of the other stuff going on in the book.

All in all, I found this to be an interesting and compelling story.  I do have to say that I felt that the plot and action were rather heavy-handed (in addition to being heavy in content) at times.  Overall, I really liked the book and felt a great deal of sympathy for the edgy characters.

Review
Adams, L.  (2007).  Jellicoe Road [book review].  Horn Book Magazine, 84(6), 708.  Retrieved from EBSCOhost

"Two tragic stories—one past, one present—come together in this carefully constructed novel set in the Australian bush. Seventeen-year-old Taylor Markham has just been made leader of the Jellicoe School’s “Underground” during the annual territory wars with the townies and the cadets. Taylor arrived at the school at age eleven when her mother dumped her at the local 7-11 and she was taken in by Hannah, voluntary caretaker of the school’s neediest students. Interspersed with war maneuvers, negotiations, and Taylor’s hotly charged meetings with cadet leader Jonah Griggs are excerpts from Hannah’s unfinished novel about three teenaged survivors of a horrific car wreck on Jellicoe Road years earlier. The three survivors, and the lifelong bonds they formed with the townie who rescued them and the cadet who befriended them, have everything to do with Taylor; together with broken memories of life with her drug-addicted mother and dream visits from a mysterious boy, Hannah’s story helps Taylor piece together the truth about her past and determine who she will become. Despite grief piled on grief in the personal histories of the characters, they are all firmly bound by friend- ship and love. Suspenseful plotting, slowly unraveling mysteries, and generations of romance shape the absorbing novel."

Suggestions for use  
I would recommend this title for high school collections.  It would be a difficult book to use for anything cutesy or creative: the plot is simply too heavy, and it deserves more sophisticated treatment.  I could see a librarian using this book for a lively and interesting book club discussion.  A comparison between Jellicoe Road and The Hunger Games would be interesting, though the settings are obviously different.  I see similarities between the female protagonists, Taylor and Katniss.  Both are tough characters on the outside trying to survive impossible circumstances.