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Review: Paper Towns

February 24, 2009 Heather 9 comments

paper-townsTitle:  Paper Towns

Author:  John Green

Published:  October 16, 2008

# of Pages:  320

ISBN:  978-0525478188

Rating:  4.5/5

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life–dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge–he follows.

After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues–and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees of the girl he thought he knew.

Like Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns is full of amazing characters that feel truly alive to the reader.  John Green has a true talent for writing characters that come to life on the page; that feel like just the people you wish you were friends with.  I definitely felt that way about these characters, as I did with those in Looking for Alaska.

Paper Towns also had a great adventure throughout the book, an adventure that I happily participated in along with Quentin and his friends.  I don’t want to give too much away, because this is the kind of book where you really shouldn’t know a lot of the plot details going in, but I’ll just say that there truly are a lot of fun twists and turns in the story.  I am still not sure how I feel about the way the book ultimately turned out, but I’m willing to be unsure about that because of how excellent the rest of the book was.

I’m so glad I stuck with John Green after reading his first two books, and I’m absolutely excited to see what else he does from here on out.

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Categories: YA, coming of age, fiction Tags:

Review: Looking for Alaska

January 23, 2009 Heather 11 comments

alaskaTitle:  Looking for Alaska

Author:  John Green

# of pages:  160

Release date:  March 3, 2005

ISBN:  978-0525475064

Rating:  5/5

Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words – and tired of his safe life at home.  He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet Francois Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps.”  Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young.  Clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy, Alaska will pull Miles into her labyrinch and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.

Looking for Alaska brilliantly chronicles the indelible impact one life can have on another.  A stunning debut, it marks John Green’s arrival as an important new voice in contemporary fiction.

Ok, so full disclosure here.  I really was nervous to read this book.  Of course I had heard everything that’s been said about John Green, about his amazingness and his fantastic talent and ohmygod he is the best writer EVAR, etc.  But when I read An Abundance of Katherines, I didn’t get it.  I mean, I liked the book – I thought it was pretty good and I was definitely entertained.  But I wasn’t wowed.

I decided to give Green another try when I saw Looking for Alaska at the library, just sitting there all lonely on the shelf.  So I took it home, dived in immediately, and OH MY GOODNESS.  I so get it now.  This book is nothing short of fantastic.  The characters are insanely real, refreshingly honest portrayals of teenagers – I so wish I could be friends with these people.  I am several years older than them, yet I would love for them to be real so that I could hang out with them.  The way they interacted with each other, the way their relationships with one another flowed together (and didn’t), it was all so true to life.  And I loved it all.

There were a lot of other things I loved about this novel, but I think the book is best read with as few spoilers as possible – there were some pretty huge events that I wasn’t expecting, and I think it’s much better to not know about them in advance.  So I’m not going to say much else – just read this book.  I really, really freaking loved it and I can’t say so enough.  And while you’re out reading Looking for Alaska, I will be searching for a copy of Paper Towns.

I read this book for Dewey’s Books Challenge – her review is here. 

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Categories: YA, coming of age, fiction Tags:

TSS – Review: An Abundance of Katherines

October 12, 2008 Heather 7 comments

An Abundance of Katherines – John Green

 From the book jacket -

When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton’s type is girls named Katherine.  And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped.  Nineteen times, to be exact.

On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his tail, and an overweight, Judge Judy-loving best friend riding shotgun – but no Katherines.  Colin is on a mission to prove the Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relationship, avenge Dumpees everywhere, and finally win him the girl.

My thoughts  -

I thought this book was good, but it did not live up to the high expectations that I had for it, based on what I’d heard from other bloggers and reviews.  I liked the character of Colin, but I liked his best friend, Hassan, even more; he was funny and sarcastic and the touch of reality that Colin so desperately needed.  I thought the way Green wrote the book was very interesting… I loved the footnotes especially.  Something about this story reminded of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, though I can’t really figure out what exactly about the two stories are similar, I think it had something to do with the main characters in both being sort of antisocial and lost, but also really sweet, wonderful kids that just had to come into their own over the course of the stories.  I don’t know… honestly, I thought this was a pretty good book and I would really like to read more from John Green, I just cannot think of the right words to describe what I particularly liked about it.  I’d suggest reading it, even though I did not love it, I know An Abundance of Katherines was a decent book with wonderful characters and an okay plot. 

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Categories: YA, fiction Tags: