Jellicoe Road is a 2006 young adult novel by Australian writer Melina Marchetta, first published in Australia under the title On the Jellicoe Road. It follows seventeen-year-old Taylor Lily Markham, who was abandoned as a child and grew up in a boarding school. She has been chosen to lead the school’s residents in a territorial war with other local kids, but she is distracted from this task when she comes across new information about her own personal history. When Taylor was eleven years old, her mother left her at a gas station on Jellicoe Road, deep in rural New South Wales, Australia. Minutes later, Taylor was picked up by Hannah, a local woman, and driven to a nearby boarding school, where she has lived ever since. Taylor has memories of happiness—lying in bed with her mother; standing on her father’s shoulders—but she doesn’t know who her parents are, and she can find no documentation of her official existence. Now seventeen, Taylor is plagued by the mystery of her origins. As one of the school’s oldest residents, Taylor is an important figure amongst the boarders, although not a universally popular one. Officially, she is a house leader, with responsibility for the other children in her boarding residency. Unofficially, she is the school’s leader in the war that breaks out annually between the boarders, the “Townies”—kids who live in the area—and the military Cadets who visit the area every year to conduct a training exercise. This territorial war has been going on for as long as anyone can remember, and Taylor’s leadership role is a grave responsibility, made more difficult by the fact that not everyone in the school supports her. The only adult in Taylor’s life is Hannah, and even she is distant and evasive. When Hannah leaves town without telling Taylor where she is going, Taylor investigates. The school principal tells her that Hannah has gone to Sydney to care for a friend, and Taylor suspects that there is more to this story than the principal is revealing. She comes to believe that Hannah’s disappearance has something to do with her. Meanwhile, the war is heating up. The leader of the Cadets is Jonah Griggs, with whom Taylor has a history. When she was fourteen, she escaped from the boarding school and went in search of her mother. On the way, she met Jonah, who had just accidentally killed his abusive father. The teenagers hitchhiked with a postman: the novel hints that this postman was a serial killer. In the night, Jonah dreamed that they would die if they continued, and he phoned the school. Taylor regards this as a betrayal, and she never wants to speak to Jonah again. Matters become even more complicated when the leader of the Townies, Chaz Santangelo, tells Taylor that he can help her to find out the truth about her parents. Taylor discovers the manuscript of a book Hannah has been writing for years. It is a novel about a group of five children, only three of whom survive a car crash on the Jellicoe Road. The text of Hannah’s book is interspersed with Taylor’s narrative (and in most editions, printed in a different font). As Taylor reads it, she begins to suspect that the story is not fictional. The pieces begin to click into place when Chaz shows Taylor a picture of a boy who became a missing person many years ago. Taylor identifies the boy as one of the children in Hannah’s book—and as her own father. Piecing together further clues, Taylor works out that her mother was also one of the three children who survived the crash. She decides it is time to get some answers. Meanwhile, Taylor has been growing close to Jonah, and the two of them once again set out in search of Taylor’s mother. They find her in Sydney, where she is dying from her drug addiction. They also learn that Jonah’s commander, Jude Scanlon, was one of the children left behind after the car accident. Taylor realizes that the territorial war was originally not a divisive conflict, but a game played by a group of friends. Hannah and Taylor bring Taylor’s mother back to Jellicoe, so she can die in their company. Jellicoe Road explores the importance of personal history to a young person’s sense of identity, as well as themes of conflict and trauma. The novel won a number of prizes, including the American Library Association’s Michael L. Printz award in 2009.

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Melina Marchetta

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Jellicoe Road

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