On the Jellicoe Road

This first half of this book was so inscrutable I almost gave up. It is very worth sticking with. I'd read Looking For Alibrandi years ago so I knew there was potential, the plot is just very obfuscated here. In the vaguest terms, this is a book about a teenage girl in Australia with a troubled past who is attending a boarding school in a remote part of the country. The boarding school has a turf war with what I presume is some sort of Australian ROTC equivalent. The book is about how the main character resolves this turf war and learns about her past along the way.

Anyway, it's a great read. The resolution of the plot reminded a lot of Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me. If you liked that, I wager you'd like this.

I first read this book when I was in high school and LOVED it. It was a 5 star and I considered it one of my favorite books. So recently I decided to reread it and annotate it. That was a mistake. The memory I had of this book was so much better than my experience this time. I just did not feel connected to it like I did last time, and I hated the romance where high school me was obsessed with it. I'm so sad that this went from a 5/5 to a 2.5/5 for me. Ugh, I'm definitely gonna halt the high school favorite rereads. Maybe the good memories should just be left alone.

OMG OMG OMG WHY WHY WHY WHYYYYY OMGGGGGGG IT IS OMG I LOVE THIS BOOK AND HATE IT AT THE SAME TIME AND I HATE THE AUTHOR AND I HATE ALL THE CHARACTERS EXCEPT FOR GRIGGS AND OH WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO ME OH MY WHYYYYYYYYYYY I LOVE THIS I LOVE ALL THE CHARACTERS AND I LOVE THIS BOOK AND I AM SO HAPPY THAT I READ AND FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUU MELINA WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO ME I WANT TO STRANGLE YOU WITH MY BARE HANDS AND I WANT TO KISS YOU ASWELL FOR GIVING ME THIS BOOK AND THE WORLD OF TAYLOR.
FUCK YOU!
I love you and i loved this book.
Sighhhh

17.04.23
The first time I read this book was in 2014, I think, and I loved it so much that I made at least 5 of my friends read it.

Since then, I've reread parts of it or the entirety of it many times, and after 9 years there's still more to discover and notice that adds to the story and makes me love the writer and her vividly charged characters even more.

This book will always be a part of me.

only made it 78 pages in and gave up...bad me.

I want to reread this already. I loved the stories in two timelines (which makes it sound like Lost, but I can't think of a better way to put it, and I REALLY loved the Griggs/Taylor relationship (and all of Taylor's friends, really, especially Raffy). This book wasn't at all what I was expecting from the blurb, which is good, because it's so much better.