Melina Marchetta

Jellicoe Road

bianca

And life goes on, which seems kind of strange and cruel when you’re watching someone die.

Then he holds her and for a moment I hear silence—

 that announces that the most horrible grief is going to follow. And it does and he’s muffling it but I can hear and I want someone to come over and jab her with a sedative because 

He is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen and it's not about his face, but the life force I can see in him. It's the smile and the pure promise of everything he has to offer. Like he's saying, "Here I am world, are you ready for so much passion and beauty and goodness and love and every other word that should be in the dictionary under the word life?" Except this boy is dead, and the unnaturalness of it makes me want to pull my hair out with Tate and Narnie and Fitz and Jude's grief all combined. It makes me want to yell at the God that I wish I didn't believe in. For hogging him all to himself. I want to say, "You greedy God. Give him back. I needed him here.”

It’s funny how you can forget everything except people loving you. Maybe that’s why humans find it so hard getting over love affairs. 

It’s not the pain they’re getting over, it’s the love.

"And then you came along and you spoke to me and nobody had looked me in the eye for years. My mum wouldn’t. She told me later that she couldn’t, because she was scared to see that I might hate her. She feels like she didn’t protect me from him. But I remember you that day and you looked at peace with yourself and it made me reconsider everything I had planned to do. Because I thought to myself, you can’t do this to her, not after the Hermit thing.” 

“Do what to me? I don’t think that leaving me on that platform would have changed my life, Griggs,” I lie. 

“You being on that platform changed mine.”

This isn’t romance. This isn’t a declaration of love or affirmation of friendship. This is something more. 

“I wasn’t there that day to get on the three forty-seven to Yass,” he says. “I was there to throw myself in front of it.”

These people have history and I crave history. I crave someone knowing me so well that they can tell what I'm thinking.

My body becomes a raft and there’s this part of me that wants just literally to go with the flow. To close my eyes and let it take me. But I know sooner or later I will have to get out, that I need to feel the earth beneath my feet, between my toes—the splinters, the bindi-eyes, the burning sensation of hot dirt, the sting of cuts, the twigs, the bites, the heat, the discomfort, the everything. 

, so when something wonderful happens, the contrast will be so massive that I will bottle the impact and keep it for the rest of my life.

So why would I want someone to be my everything when one day they might not be around? What will be left of me then?

Is a person worth more because they have someone to grieve for them?

That someone can want something out of another person who gives absolutely nothing in return astounds me.

Someone asked us later, “Didn’t you wonder why no one came across you sooner?” 

When you see your parents zipped up in black body bags on the Jellicoe Road like they’re some kind of garbage, don’t you know? 

chloe rae

I can’t stop crying. 
This book just changed my life.

Savindi Jinasena

Between 2.5/3 stars. I wasn't wowed by this book. I'll write down my thoughts about it later.

mercy

i didn't think rereading this could mess me up even more than when i first read it but it did so good to know ! anyways these characters are my best friends i'm going to know them for the rest of my life !!!

Tameka Young

This is one of those books that I had to think about whether I liked it after I finished. It took so long (over 2 months) for me to get into it that when I finally got into the meat of the story I was still confused over whether I actually liked it or if I was just relieved to finally understand what the hell was happening. 

Overall, this book is incredibly well written and worth sticking with the confusion of the beginning to get to the richness of the mysterious plot in the last half. 

Oh and Jonah Griggs...seriously.

Jellicoe Road

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