John Green – Paper Towns

134. Paper Towns by John Green (2008)

Length: 307 pages

Genre: Young Adult

Started: 22 October 2008
Finished: 23 October 2008

Margo disappears;
Quentin must follow the clues.
Who is she, really?

The main character
spends most of the book missing.
Just read it, okay?

Summary: Who is Margo Roth Spiegelman? To Quentin Jacobson, she is the unattainable girl next door, the queen of high school, the girl that he’s secretly loved since they were children. She’s the girl who knocks on his window one night a few weeks before graduation, and drags him out on a spree of pranks and rule-breaking. She’s also the girl who disappears the next day, leaving behind a Margo-sized hole in Quentin’s life, and a series of clues that Quentin’s convinced are meant for him. But as he follows these clues, learning more about Margo in her absence than he ever knew in her presence, he becomes less and less sure about what – or who – he’s going to find. Because who is Margo Roth Spiegelman, anyways?

This book is being sold with two different covers. Before reading it, I liked the yellow "happy Margo" cover better; after finishing it, I think I prefer the blue "sad Margo" cover. Regardless, I also now get the point of having multiple covers.

Review: My first thought on closing this book was: “It’s not fair.” It’s not fair that John Green continues to put out book after wonderful book, not fair that his books can make me laugh and cry at the same time, not fair that he somehow seems to get real, actual teenagers and portray them so vividly and accurately when other authors seem to have forgotten what real teenager-dom is like. But, maybe more to the point, it is supremely not fair that these books are only coming out now, when I haven’t seen the inside of teenager-dom for a decade. Where these books when I was a few weeks from graduating? Where were the books that just got it then? And maybe it’s because I am All Growed Up now that I can see how real and how right Green’s books are, and maybe I’m only imagining “real teenager-dom”, as viewed through a nostalgic filter, but if I am, so what? Green’s books portray teenager-dom exactly the way that I remember it being, only with the humor and the heartbreak and the philosophical revelations that you think are yours alone amplified ever so slightly.

So, yes, Paper Towns is manifestly similar to Green’s earlier books, Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines – smart, nerdy, smart-alecky boy, accompanied by his smart, nerdy, smart-alecky friends, meets a girl who is rebellious and challenging and shakes him out of his comfortable little world. And you know what? I do not care. Similar though the characters may be, each book has a different story, different quirks, and ultimately, a different point. And while Paper Towns‘s message, about whether we really know the people we think we know, and how we build up constructs of other people in our heads that aren’t really them, was not really a revelation to me at this point in my life, I absolutely enjoyed every second of the ride to get there. I laughed, I pondered, I cried, and I got nostalgic for my high school friends and that feeling of invincible clarity that comes with being young. I didn’t like it quite as much as Looking for Alaska, and it’s more serious and a little darker than An Abundance of Katherines, but there’s really only a hair’s breadth to choose between them, and I think fans of any John Green’s books won’t be disappointed. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Highly recommended, to anyone who is or even vaguely remembers what it was like to be a teenager.

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Links: John Green’s Website

Other Reviews: Presenting Lenore, Confessions of a Bibliovore, Musings of the Bookgoddess, Em’s Bookshelf, Liv’s Book Reviews
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First Line: The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.

Vocab:

• p. 88: ““Yes, I was wondering if it would be possible for you to write a sestina about Margo Roth Spiegelman’s breasts?”” – a poem of six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoy, originally without rhyme, in which each stanza repeats the end words of the lines of the first stanza, but in different order, the envoy using the six words again, three in the middle of the lines and three at the end.
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• p. 212: “I carried the matryoshka dolls into the guest bedroom, where Radar was carefully stashing Santas into a dresser.” – another term for Russian nesting dolls.
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