Jellicoe Road Chapters 1-5

I've started reading this book called Jellicoe Road recently and I'm going to use it as my first topic to blog about. I haven't gotten really far in it, but so far from what I can tell it's about this girl, Taylor, who is going to this school where the kids from the school are fighting for 'territory' in and around the neighborhood with the 'cadets' boys from a military school who come out to the countryside about once a year, and the 'townies', the kids from town, I assume.

Aside from Taylor's story there seems to be another story happening on the side that we get little glimpses of now and then. The shift in narrator is shown by making the text in italics whenever we're reading about Narnie. She seems to be in the same place as Taylor, same neighborhood and there are 'cadets' and 'townies' in Narnie's story too, however they don't seem to be fighting, like in Taylor's story. It's a little strange. I haven't read very much of Narnie's story yet since it's only appeared about three times, so I'll talk a bit about Taylor for now.

Taylor's narration reminds me a bit of characters like Maximum Ride or Katniss Everdeen, she's tough and no-nonsense, and it shows in the narration a bit. It's very to-the-point, but at the same time it doesn't lack description at all.

Taylor is the leader of her dorm, and sneaks out nightly to conduct negotiations with other dorm leaders and the leaders of the town kids and cadets. When she's not at school she lives with Hannah, who is taking care of her now (I don't know if she 'adopted' her in the strictest sense...) since her mother left her when she was young. She seems to get annoyed and stressed easily and doesn't want to trust people at all. For a while she made references to an incident until in the fourth chapter she revealed that she ran away with a cadet named Jonah Griggs, who later turned her and himself in, stopping their 'escape' to wherever they were going. Now that she has to negotiate with him, after several years of not talking to each other, things are getting tense.

OK characters!

Making a character sheet helps me follow what’s happening better in the story, mostly I make it more for my own benefit rather than others', but it may be helpful anyway. If they don't have lines, then I won't put them here! That being said, most of these characters feel pretty minor right now, the only ones who feel like main characters, or potential main characters, are Taylor, Hannah, Jonah, Narnie, and Jude. Anyway here are all the characters I found while flipping back through the pages quickly for refrence.

Taylor's Story:

School kids/neutral:

Ben Cassidy

Raffaela

Richard

Jessa McKenzie

Hannah

Townies:
Chaz Santangelo

Cadets:

Jonah Griggs

Narnie's Story:

????/neutral:

Narnie
Tate
Webb
Fitz

Cadets:

Jude Scanlon

By the way! Tell me if you like the character sheet, if you don't I won't post it anymore, and if you do, I'll update it, I get the feeling I've got to meet more characters than I already have. Writing them all down like this makes it feel like there weren't so many, but while I was reading I was starting to have a hard time keeping everyone straight. It was probably becuase I just started reading and then suddenly a ton of characters dropped on my head. I think I'm going to enjoy this book.