"Jellicoe Road" by Melina Marchetta

Somehow, I missed reading this Printz winner from a few years back. I think it was so popular when it came out that I wasn't able to get a copy to read initially, then I just forgot. Well-written, yes. Layered and unique, yes. Did I like it? No. I think maybe this was just one of those "bad timing" things. Life is busy, I'm a little stressed, and reading this book in small chunks did not work. It is a complex tale -- two stories interweaving, with little context in the beginning for either. One of the tales is deliberately out of order, the other makes sense after a while but the Australian foreignness is yet another hurdle to overcome. I'm not dissing the Aussies. We adore Markus Zusak. And Margo Lanagan, despite the occasional bleak darkness, is pretty engaging. This novel, however, felt distant. Taking place (I gather) at the edge of the outback, there is a constant use of vocabulary and phrasing I had to read twice to fully understand. Add the inter-woven plots that seem to start in the middle and I was literally at chapter 14 before I began to see the arc of the book. Which was frustrating. What should have been a story of love/loss and mystery turned into a tale that was not a page-turner for me. I found the lead character, Taylor, to be nearly as irritating as Bella from "Twilight" and the so-called mystery fairly guessable once I could place the characters and events. The efforts by the author to hide facts were so successful I missed one of the "big reveals" even when it happened. She seemed more concerned with the essence of things than the things themselves. It's possible it is "just Australian." From the first pages, I could sense the cultural elements of Dreamtime and Walkabout having a lot of influence. Not being from that culture, however, I was never sure what was real or what was dreamed (the Australians, of course, would say that Dreamtime is real, just another reality). Could someone who has read the book tell me who the little boy hanging from the tree is? Four hundred pages later and I still don't know. Despite all the different threads, the story also felt contrived. At one point, a disaster-like event seems to occur for no other reason than to move characters to a key clue in the story. I guess, as a reader, I resent having events thrown in at random just to advance the tale the author wants to tell. I've always felt the best authors let the story go where it goes, instead of warping everything around the point they want to make. There is a strong group of readers who adore this book, so I can't say it's bad. It's just not for me.