taken from Goodreads:
"What do you want from me? he asks. What I want from every person in my life, I want to tell him. More.
Abandoned by her mother on Jellicoe Road when she was eleven, Taylor Markham, now seventeen, is finally being confronted with her past. But as the reluctant leader of her boarding school dorm, there isn't a lot of time for introspection. And while Hannah, the closest adult Taylor has to family, has disappeared, Jonah Griggs is back in town, moody stares and all.
In this absorbing story by Melina Marchetta, nothing is as it seems and every clue leads to more questions as Taylor tries to work out the connection between her mother dumping her, Hannah finding her then and her sudden departure now, a mysterious stranger who once whispered something in her ear, a boy in her dreams, five kids who lived on Jellicoe Road eighteen years ago, and the maddening and magnetic Jonah Griggs, who knows her better than she thinks he does. If Taylor can put together the pieces of her past, she might just be able to change her future."
I'm a big sap, I'll admit it. I cry easily, even over commercials (or maybe especially over commercials?) But it isn't often that a book makes me cry. This one did; it also made me stay up until 4:00 in the morning just to finish it, and I haven't done that in quite a while.
Marchetta deserves the Printz Award a hundred times over for this engaging YA novel. I loved every minute of it. At first, I wasn't really sure what was going on, as there are a couple of different storylines happening at the same time, and it takes a while for some important details about each character to come to light. But I had been warned about that (and now you have, as well), so I stuck it out, and then things really started coming together. Seeing how the two storylines come together, detail after detail, is one of the most rewarding reading experiences I've had in some time.
The characters here are fantastic; their relationships are so believable and compelling, and how they interact with each other is what's at the core of this novel. It's about love and loss and hope and heartbreak; one of the other reviews on Goodreads describes it as "raw, genuine, and bone-deep aching." I couldn't agree more. It's not often that a book leaves me speechless, but this is one of them. There's nothing else I can say except that I think this is one of the best books I've ever read, and I can't wait to read it again.
