

It wasn’t necessarily a bad or even badly told story it was just seemed so murky and muddled. That first was just sucha chore, I thought it could be the first to go. After three hours I was considering deleting it even though I have a rule about always finishing books. After an hour I put it down and didn’t pick it up for over a year. Jellico started out painfully slowly with no sense of where the story is going. Toward the end of the story, I did decide that I liked the book, but it just wasn't my cup of tea. She is a bit unstable and has huge gaps in her memory and is constantly trying to figure out how to get back to her Mother who had abandoned her when she was 11.

The main character, Taylor, is a Jellicoe Road resident. The three groups have mini battles of control and territory, but all in a nice way (or at least it is supposed to be in a nice way.) Most of the kids that live at the Jellicoe Road school seem to have some emotional dysfunction or other problems they are dealing with, like both parents getting killed or pyromaniac tendencies. Jellicoe Road reminds me of a summer camps where they have kids who live in the camp and then bring in kids from the neighboring town and then bus kids in from wherever else. The similarity being the place they were located, Jellicoe Road, in Australia.

The story went back and forth between telling the story of a present day situation with a bunch of kids to an older story of a bunch of kids. Where to start? This story was very confusing at first, but I expected that because I had an advanced warning. 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. 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. 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. 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. Taylor Markham is now a senior at the Jellicoe School, and has been made leader of the boarders. Printz Award for excellence in Young Adult literature.Ī highly anticipated follow-up from the best-selling author of Looking for Alibrandi and Saving Francesca, both highly acclaimed productions available from Bolinda Audio.
