Book #22: On the Jellicoe Road

Title: On the Jellicoe Road
Author: Melina Marchetta

I read On the Jellicoe Road as part of my multiple narrator project because I knew it was a good example of using multiple narrators in a Young Adult piece. What I didn't know when I downloaded the audiobook is that it uses almost exactly the same technique I used in the first draft of the YA manuscript I wrote last semester. In both books, there are two stories that take place about 20 years apart. While the main thrust of the story takes place in the present, at the beginning of each chapter there's a snippet of the story from the parents' generation. My professor in the YA novel seminar didn't really like the technique in my book (I used segments from the mother's journal to open each chapter), but I've been reluctant to give it up. In On the Jellicoe Road I think the technique really works, and in future drafts of my manuscript I hope to figure out how to make the mother's story work better.

On the Jellicoe Road takes place in Australia, on the most beautiful road anyone has ever seen. Several years earlier, Taylor Markham's mother abandoned her at a 7-11 on Jellicoe Road, and she's spent her adolescence in a boarding school where Hannah, the house mother, looks in on her from time to time. Taylor feels a special connection with Hannah, but she's not really sure why. And when Taylor is elected head of the school, she's thrust into leading her housemates in a decades-long battle against the kids from the local high school and the kids from the military camp down the road. As the battle wages on, Taylor discovers that the hole in her life created by the absence of her parents can be filled with answers she finds on the Jellicoe Road and through her relationships with the other kids and with Hannah. The book moves a little bit slowly, and there are times where the plot seems a little too neatly tied together, and the denouement takes longer than it should, but overall, I really liked the book, and I finished it feeling that I had a better sense of how I'd apply the multiple narrator principle to my manuscript, which is a very good thing.