“There is no place in my life for sentimentality,” Taylor Markham thinks, near the start of Jellicoe Road. It seems true when she says it: she’s 17 and has been at the Jellicoe School for years, and now she’s “the one-in-charge” in the Territory Wars that happen for six weeks, in which students from her school face off against local kids (the Townies) and boys from a Sydney military school (the Cadets). The Jellicoe School is pretty much home for Taylor, though she also has lived in a nearby house that belongs to a woman in her early 30s named Hannah, who’s been taking care of Taylor since her drug-addicted mom abandoned her in a 7-11 bathroom when Taylor was eleven. But Taylor’s story isn’t the only one we get: there’s also a story from decades before that starts with a car crash on Jellicoe Road: we quickly learn that this other story is a book that Hannah’s writing, but Taylor wonders if it’s more than that, too.
At the start of the book, I found the dual narratives somewhat off-putting, and had a hard time getting into the book generally: it felt like there was a lot going on and it didn’t all flow together, and I wasn’t really into some of the moments of magical realism. But by the end, I was sitting on my couch in tears, so I’d say Jellicoe Road won me over, magical realism and all.
What makes the book work for me, mostly, is Taylor, and how she grows over the course of it. She’s so closed-off when the book starts (understandably, given her childhood): she has a hard time trusting people and tells herself she isn’t particularly interested in changing that. But of course that isn’t totally true, and on some level she knows it. I like how we get to see Taylor becoming friends with other kids from her school, and becoming close to the leaders of the Townies and the Cadets as well (especially the leader of the Cadets, a kid named Jonah she knows from a few years back). And I like how we get to see her learning more about Hannah and her mom and the other kids who were part of their close-knit circle of friends, back when they were kids and teenagers, and how she starts to understand some things about why her mother has done the things she’s done.
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