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 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.