On the Jellicoe Road Melina Marchetta
Penguin Australia
Taylor Markham has been at the school on the Jellicoe Road since she was six years old. It’s her turn to lead the students in the annual territory wars with the Townies and Cadets from a school in Sydney. But lost memories of her childhood, her mother and a man she hopes is her father distract her from the game. When her caregiver, Hannah, disappears, Taylor studies the stories Hannah left behind, looking for clues to her whereabouts. She forms unlikely alliances with territory rivals, and together they work to solve the mysteries behind many things that happened on the Jellicoe Road.
When I started reading this novel, I felt a bit lost. It seems like two stories are happening simultaneously, and it’s hard to figure out which parts of which stories are significant at first. I love Marchetta’s Lumatere series, so I really wanted to stick with this book. In reading other reviews, I found other readers who’d had similar experiences, so I kept reading. And it definitely paid off.
The stories do intersect, and so many things make sense once it’s clear how they fit together. I loved the elements of history sort of repeating itself among Taylor and her friends – it’s kind of the redeemed version of the other story. The characters are fantastic. The romantic tension is delicious. Really great stuff.
Language Content
Extreme profanity, mild to moderate frequency.
Sexual Content Kissing and references to sex. A couple of scenes briefly describe couples leading up to having sex. A couple times teens see each other in their underwear.
Spiritual Content None.
Violence Some kids fist-fighting. A fire destroys a house and two girls go missing. A shooting accident kills a boy (No description of his injuries.)
A bloody coup overthrows the king and wipes out nearly the entire family. Only a baby girl escapes with the help of a palace guard. Rema grows up knowing nothing of her past or who she really is. Her only clue is a necklace with a cryptic message inside.
Though she is raised as the daughter of a horse merchant, she catches the eye of Prince Darmik, commander of the king’s army. His jealous brother, the Crown Prince, sees Darmik’s affection for the girl and blackmails her to marry him instead.
Torn between her attraction for Prince Darmik and the Crown Prince’s threats, Rema does the only thing she can: she pledges herself to Prince Lennek to spare her family from harm.
Rema is a high-spirited girl, one who will not easily be broken. Prince Darmik is an honorable man. Though his father the king makes some terrible choices, Darmik will uphold the law and support his king. Both are complex characters with internal as well as external conflicts.
Prince Lennek and the king were much less complex. The king is evil because he is greedy. He’s greedy because he is evil. Prince Lennek is spoiled and that motivates all sorts of disastrous choices. I felt like there were a lot of unexploited opportunities for tension and complexity in both these characters. I couldn’t understand why Darmik would blindly serve them if they were indeed so vile.
I found the economics of the story world a bit distracting. The farmers grow the food, which the king then collects and sells back to the people, though much of it spoils before it can be distributed. Servants receive only bread and water twice a day. The people are not allowed to travel from one district to another. How does this make any sense for trade? If the king is levying high taxes against the people, how are there barons or lords still wealthy? A nearly bankrupt kingdom – now that would give the king some greater motivation than greed. Seventeen years of this seems like it would leave the kingdom bankrupted with a rebellion mounted long ago.
Also (spoiler alert) at one point Rema is accused of betraying her engagement to Prince Lennek by being caught with another man. She refutes this as a lie. Um… but like two scenes ago she was kissing another guy?! I was confused.
One thing I did enjoy was listening to Michelle Michaels narration of the story. Her voice carried the intensity perfect for the suspenseful or high-action scenes. Her accent fit the story well. Sometimes the intensity of the narration seemed a little high for the scene at hand, but overall she definitely kept the feeling that important things were about to happen throughout the entire audiobook.
A lot of readers have raved about this book on Goodreads. Honestly, I couldn’t really get into it. There were too many things that made me sit back and scratch my head. For readers looking for a fantasy fix, I recommend the series Tales of Goldstone Wood by Anne Elisabeth Stengl (very clean, Christian content.) The recently released novel Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard is a bit similar in plot but, in my opinion, more well-executed.
Language Content
None.
Sexual Content Brief kissing. References to Prince Lennek’s promiscuous behavior. A palace servant is discovered to be pregnant. She claims Lennek is the father. Darmik and some of his soldiers visit a tavern at which some girls approach them. Darmik sends them away.
Spiritual Content None.
Violence Darmik uses military force to capture rebels spreading rumors that an heir to the former king lives. He plans to torture the rebels to find out more, but descriptions are extremely brief. When Rema is sent to the dungeon, she finds terrible conditions there.
Drug Content
Darmik and his men visit a tavern for ale and information.
Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Over the next few weeks, The Story Sanctuary will be home to reviews for some great new releases as well as some catch-up reviews on recent or past releases. Here are a few you can expect to see…
When You Leave by Monica Ropal
This was one of those stories that left me pining for another chapter. Really great characters and tension. Very angsty story, which is so often what I crave in YA.
Between Shadows by Kathleen Cook Waldron
I had the pleasure of meeting this author and talking about the book with her late last year. Her description of the story and its characters were so intriguing that I’ve been thinking about them ever since. Can’t wait to crack the cover on this one!
Zeroboxer by Fonda Lee
I found myself drawn to it because it’s so different from my usual reading pick. Boxing and political intrigue? I’m so game.
All the Rage by Courtney Summers
Apparently NetGalley flagged this one for me because I loved We Were Liars by E. Lockhart (which I definitely did!) So I’m nervous – it’s usually a bad idea for me to go into a book expecting it to be like another book – but hopeful. Sounds like it’s got some deep psychological exploration in it, and I’m always up for that.
Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard
Twitter has been abuzz with praise for this novel. It’s sort of X-men meets fairy tale. Loads of political drama, intrigue and betrayal.
The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
This is a book that caught my eye on another reviewer’s to-read list. The cover is really intriguing, and I find myself really curious about a story in which the goblin is the good guy. There aren’t too many of those.
Fairest by Marissa Meyer
This is one of those rare series in which I’ve read all the books leading up to this one. I’m super excited to read it. Meyer brings really imaginative story world to every book in the Lunar Chronicles. I’m as interested in Queen Levana’s history as I am in how Meyer constructs Levana’s world.
Fix by Force by Jason Warne
I’ve almost picked this novel up several times, and this month I’ll finally read and review it. It’s a coming-of-age plus drug battle type story, another of my known literary weaknesses.
Violet’s best friend Ori would have done anything for her. That’s what best friends do. At least, that’s what Violet tells herself happened that night behind the theater, the night those two girls died. After that, Ori gets sent upstate to a girls’ prison.
Amber waits for her new prison roommate. She’s known the girl will come since the night the doors opened, the night she saw the girl who didn’t belong. She also knows the new roommate starts the beginning of the end. That they will all die in a few weeks’ time.
In poetic narrative, Suma delivers a story of three girls and the guilt or innocence that binds them to one another. It’s thick, dark, and supernatural.
As a former dancer, I enjoyed the references to ballet and the role the competitive dance world played in shaping Orianna and Violet. It created a natural foundation of tension and sense of rivalry that kept me turning page after page of the story.
The supernatural element comes into play when all the prison doors open one night and many prisoners leave their cells. Amber meets a shadow of a girl who doesn’t belong and afterward sees glimpses of the prison as it looks in the future. It pretty much freaks her out and she worries that she’s losing her mind.
Suma pulls the threads of all the girls’ stories together powerfully in the conclusion of the tale. Again, it’s dark, but it also feels necessary. This is definitely less a feel-good tale and more a deeply thoughtful, balance-in-the-universe sort of story.
Language Content
Infrequent profanity.
Sexual Content Both Ori and Violet are sexually active. Ori has a loving relationship with a devoted boyfriend, where Violet chooses shallower, physical relationships. In one scene, Violet engages in oral sex with a boy. She’s caught and possibly photographed in the act. There are also several brief references to girl-on-girl experiences within the prison.
Spiritual Content None.
Violence Amber’s stepfather physically abused her. Amber fantasized about ways to murder her father in a journal. Descriptions are brief. The description of his death in a fire is also pretty brief.
Two girls bully another girl pretty severely. There are some brief descriptions of things they do. They’re less violent than straight up horrible.
Drug Content
A vine with flowers, a powerful hallucinogenic, grows outside Amber’s cell window. Some girls smoke the flowers to get high. Another inmate, Peaches, trades drugs to the other girls. No point-of-view characters use drugs in the story.
Callie spent most of her childhood believing her father is after her. She’s never been to school, never had any real friends. Anytime there’s a whiff of suspicion, her mother whisks them away to a new town, new trashy job, new sleazy boyfriend.
Then the truth comes in the form of an arrest warrant for her mom. In a blink, Callie finds herself living with her estranged dad, his new wife and their two small children, right smack in the middle of a large, loud, loving Greek family. For the first time, someone cares whether Callie comes or goes. She has friends, if she can crack the code on how to keep them. And she might even have her first real date!
The relationship between Callie and her dad is really moving. Here’s this man who hasn’t seen his daughter in so many years, who wants so badly to reconnect with her. Here’s this girl whose entire life has been turned upside down, who worries that accepting the father she didn’t know she had means betraying her mom, who’s sick and needs her more than anyone. That tug-of-war was so well-crafted and believable. There’s a lot of threads about reconciliation between estranged family members and the importance of family and community. Those were great themes and very well-executed.
While in the care of her mother, Callie was sexually abused by her mother’s live-in boyfriend. This leaves deep emotional scars. She starts hooking up (meeting to have sex with) guys as a young teenager, even though afterward she feels used and dirty. On one such quest, she lucks out and meets a guy who not only takes her to bed the first time they spend any time together, but also wants to build a relationship with her and cares very deeply for her, despite his playboy reputation.
This does show Callie learning to build trust and to experience sex within a safe, loving relationship, which is so healing. At the same time, I couldn’t help thinking that in real life, a girl can sleep with many, many guys hoping that the next day they’ll turn out to stick around. It’s probably not the best way to find a good guy. Conservative me couldn’t help wishing she’d found that he was a good guy first and built that trust first.
Besides that, though, I felt really connected with Callie’s emotional journey. I loved her demonstrative family, and the vividly described setting. It has more sexual content than books I’ve read by Sarah Dessen, but the strong heroine and deep emotional journey reminded me of her stories. If you’re a Dessen fan, you may want to check out this book.
Language Content
Extreme profanity, moderate frequency.
Sexual Content Callie becomes sexually active in her early teens. She briefly recounts those experiences as well as memories of childhood sexual abuse. The abuse memories are pretty intense. A boy kisses Callie later in the story and she immediately takes off her shirt. She meets another young man and has sex with him without knowing much more than his name. The descriptions of her encounters are fairly short and not super graphic, but there are some details given. Another couple engages in a pretty heavy make-out session on the couch, but few details are given.
Much of the sexual element in the story is really about Callie’s abuse and the process she experiences to learn how to have a healthy relationship with sex.
Spiritual Content Callie’s family attend a Greek Orthodox Church and encourage her to attend with them, but don’t pressure her. Callie really isn’t into the spiritual stuff.
Violence Callie witnesses a man smacking his adult son.
Drug Content
Callie’s mom hangs around some pretty unsavory bars and probably drinks too much. Callie and her friends drink alcohol. They are all under 21.
Mina Grime has the worst luck ever. Just about everywhere she goes, bizarre misfortunes follow her: a bakery harpy, a stampede of nursery rhyme animals in the street. Mina soon finds out this isn’t a simple matter of luck, however. Her family has lived under a curse for generations. Now the curse has come after her, and if she doesn’t defeat it, her younger brother will have to face it. Mina sets out to complete all the fairy tales penned by the Grimm brothers.
The best thing about this book is its clever premise. The way Hahn recreates the familiar fairy tales in a contemporary setting is smart and cute. Those made for the best parts of the story, though in this first book in the series, much of the story is devoted to setting up the premise. Later books may focus more on the fairy tales, which would be, if I judge based on those included in this first book, very entertaining.
The characters are simple, not deeply layered and a bit cliché. The boy is handsome, thoughtful and perfect. The girl is insecure and fiercely independent. Her best friend is peppy and loyal. This didn’t ruin the story for me, but it didn’t make it stand out as one I can’t wait to tell all my friends about, either.
I listened to this story as an audiobook (largely because I adore the narration by Khristine Hvam) so I can’t speak to how well the book was edited for grammar and punctuation. As I browsed other reviews, I noticed several claimed there are some errors in the e-book version. If you’re considering purchasing the e-book, I’d recommend reading the sample pages first.
Language Content
None.
Sexual Content None.
Spiritual Content Mina’s family lives under a terrible curse. In order to undo the curse, she has to complete each of the fairy tales penned by her ancestors, the Grimm brothers. She encounters creatures from a fairy world (a fairy and a werewolf type creature, for instance.)
