i have got to stop being surprised when teen fiction is good. printz-award winning fiction (you know, the award for literary teen fiction that all the grown-ups read and say "this is for teens??"). australian teen fiction. complicated, multi-layered teen fiction. 
 this book is all of the above, and it is remarkable. 
 it has sex and drugs and rock and roll, it has violence and terrible crimes, it has shock and awe and guilt and terrible secrets and it opens with a death. this is my kind of teen fiction. it is mostly about loss and being lost, and being so close to redemption but frustratingly denied. it is about the teen-girl default position of lashing out like a wild animal and of the deepest regrets. 
 it howls. 
 it is astonishing - jellicoe road is sophisticated both in its subject matter and the way in which the story is told. it actually took me a little while to get into the swing of things - whose story is italicized? what is their relationship to the rest of the story?? but it was a good kind of lost - the kind of lost where you are in an interesting part of town with attractive people and cute little knickknack shops, not the kind of lost where you are late to a job interview in the wrong goddamned borough. 
 and toward the middle, the plot became a little predictable, but that didn't even matter, because by that point i was so enmeshed in these characters' lives - i just wanted everything to work out for them, even though i knew this was not going to be the kind of book with a tidy-sweet ending. 
 she created powerfully three-dimensional characters that i cared about and hated to close the book on. truly - it has been a while since i have fought sleep. i love sleep - i neeeed sleep. but i forced myself awake to keep reading this, and when i finally had to give in, it was with the deepest resentment. 
 this is a rich and emotionally complicated tale, and when i go to that panel next week, i may have to throw myself on her a little bit and beg her to take me with her and tell me bedtime stories every night. 
 for posterity, i will announce here that i did not cry. but this is definitely a crying-type of book for those of you that way inclined. i got that throat-thing that happens before a good cry, which is unusual enough for me, but i expect you people will cry like when a puppy dies on your birthday. 
 and you will love every minute of it. 
 (view spoiler)[and can i just say how my heart went out to jude, who was so like my beloved jude the obscure - who just wanted so badly to be let into christminster/the tragic bond the other kids had forged on the old jellicoe road?? i mean, he ended up better than hardy's jude, but still - the yearning!! you have my heart, jude. (hide spoiler)]