Jellicoe Road Abandonment Quotes

While Hannah's kept herself relatively distant out of respect for Tate's wishes, there's no doubt that Taylor's bonded to her anyway and desperately fears being left by the only stable adult figure in her life. To Taylor, as long as Hannah's house isn't completed, she can't vanish from her life.

Taylor sets up the dismal situation for most of the kids at the school early in the story by telling us where most of the students come from. While it sounds like many of them are gifted students brought there for educational opportunities, there's still the sadness of the fact that most of them lack supportive families.

We don't find out about the horrors Taylor went through as a child until near the end of the book, but with that information in mind, think about how traumatic this must have been for her. After moving from place to place with her mom, having to live under different names, and being molested by the neighbor's boyfriend, getting dumped at a gas station had to take the cake. No wonder she has issues.

Ever serve as a camp counselor, youth leader, or in any position that requires you to be responsible for a large amount of teenagers? Not exactly the easiest job, right? Now imagine having to live with them all the time and counsel them on their needs when you yourself barely have it together. Part of Taylor's journey is learning to love and care for the kids in her House while coming to terms with her own abandonment.

Based on how annoyed she gets with kids like Jessa, Taylor seems to pride herself on not being clingy and dependent… at least until she is. When Hannah disappears, she finds herself faced with the fact that she actually has all the character traits she demeans the kids in her House for having.

According to Taylor's logic, as long as Hannah's house isn't done, she has to stick around. Now Hannah has not only disappeared, but her house is pretty much finished as well. In Taylor's mind, the two are connected and this means that the chances of Hannah returning aren't good.

So even though we could argue that Tate had a good reason for abandoning Taylor, we can also probably agree that dumping your eleven year old at a gas station isn't a good move, regardless of whether someone's going to show up five minutes later and pick her up. What's interesting is how Taylor compares Hannah's disappearance to her mother's and comes out finding Hannah to be the greater offender.

While the idea of a kid remembering her birth seems a little out there, we at Shmoop would like to remind you that Jellicoe Road is a work of fiction, and even if it wasn't, Taylor's particularly unusual. Regardless of whether the memory is real, it's powerful. It kind of makes us wonder if that hesitation Tate shows would have been present had Webb been alive for their daughter's birth.

Maybe, like Jonah Griggs, you're tempted to look at Tate and see a terrible mother. Knowing the whole story, though, makes us reconsider leveling that kind of judgment. Tate is ultimately a person who experienced so much loss in her life that she got pushed over the edge and disappeared into drugs and alcohol as a way to forget. That doesn't excuse the kind of neglect Taylor describes in this paragraph, but it at least helps us understand how Tate could get to that low point.

Taylor's ultimately brought to the place of not only understanding her mother's decision to leave her, but sensing the great regret she must have felt for doing so. By emotionally putting herself in her mom's shoes, she's able to sense the way leaving Taylor behind hurt her mother as well as herself.