On the Jellicoe Road

Author:  Melina Marchetta

Year: 2009

Publisher:  Belinda Publishing Pty Ltd.

Narrator: Rebecca Macauley

Audible Description:

Taylor Markham is now a senior at the Jellicoe School, and has been made leader of the boarders. She is responsible for keeping the upper hand in the territory wars with the townies, and the cadets who camp on the edge of the school's property over summer. She has to keep her students safe and the territories enforced and to deal with Jonah Griggs - the leader of the cadets and someone she'd rather forget. But what she needs to do, more than anything, is unravel the mystery of her past and find her mother - who abandoned her on the Jellicoe Road six years before. The only connection to her past, Hannah, the woman who found her, has now disappeared, too, and he only clue Taylor has about Hannah and her mother's past is a partially written manuscript about a group of five kids from the Jellicoe School, 20 years ago.

Wow. So it took me a little bit of time to get into this book. I'm a southern girl with my own accent issues and this is obviously an Australian book with it's own accent issues so getting used to the accent took me a while. Then the book just jumps between alternating storylines and it takes some getting used to but once I did, I was hooked. I was glued to the story and could not put it down. I was at work, listening to the story and crying and thinking I needed to turn it off because I was crying at work and then thinking "forget that, I've got to know what happens." This is an absolutely beautiful story about friendship and the bonds that are formed in the lowest moments of our lives and I loved it. I can definitely see why it won the Printz Award.