Review: On the Jellicoe Road Audiobook by Melina Marchetta

Title: On the Jellicoe Road
Author: Melina Marchetta
Narrator: Rebecca Macauley 
Goodreads .  Amazon
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A revelation.

That’s what this audiobook was to me. Even after many, many years of reading the book again and again. I used to think I had it memorized even, but then it's like you hear someone else’s voice, saying all those sentences that bring so many great and incapacitating new emotions that it was almost like lighting stroke my heart.  

I am pretty sure there are quite a few poor souls out there that have not come across this book, or audiobook, yet. So I’m going to review it again, in the hopes to make you pick it up and make this world better.

On The Jellicoe Road goes beyond any realm or genre in literature. It surpasses boundaries and defines a whole new category of incredible, tremendous, fantastic and wonderful. It’s one of the wildest emotional rides your heart can take. The story is so deep, so clever, so thoughtful and perfect that it’s life changing. It certainly was for me.

One of the most common complains I come across when I recommend this book is people not getting it. At first it is confusing, but not because it’s bad narrative, because it’s mysterious. You will want to figure this book, but you won’t be able to at first, because like I told you before, it’s clever. It’s intelligent and it knows deep and dark things you will only get to know as you read along.

What is magical in all of this, though, is that you don’t even have to know what is going on to be pulled in. To get engrossed. To become obsessed. Because this is one rich story, and Melina Marchetta is probably one of the most powerful story tellers of our time.

The audiobook, like I suspected, is amazing too. The narrator did a wonderful job at conveying the emotions we needed. She did a great job of representing the turmoil inside Taylor Markham, her confusion and pain, her annoyance and her spirit. And it is not even one of those high budget audiobooks that seem to be the regularity now. No, it’s simple but engaging. And to hear a story like this, a story I hold so dear to my heart, in the voice of someone else but me was so gut-wrenching that I spend half the time crying my eyes out.

And in the aftermath I can’t recommend it enough. For the people that have never read this book, to the ones that will be introduced to it for the first time, for everyone. This is it.