A warning: this will be a biased review.I love John Green as a person. He and his brother, Hank, have a youtube channel where they are awesome on a regular basis. John always appealed to me because he’s a History nerd and he’s all literary and thinks teenagers are also awesome and are worth listening to (which we are!). So, it’s kind of easy to love him as and author.
I’ve been looking for his books for a while, and I finally got my hands on Paper Towns.
“Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificent, adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she opens his bedroom window late one night and summons him to join ger in an ingenious campaign of revenge, he follows.
After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to find that Margo has not. Always an enigma, she now becomes a mystery and Q soon learns that there are clues to be followed in his search for Margo.” - from the back cover.
I’m the same age as Quentin. I’ll graduate later in May. We have the same general feelings. John Green nailed all of them in this novel.
Everything was profoundly real, even with the crazy antics and adventures and escapades. I’ve never been to Orlando, and it was like I’ve lived there all my life. I loved everyone, I loved how parents were portrayed as normal people who care about their kids and also have their weird quirks and do deserve actual lines!
It’s so good, it’s really so good. I sped through it in one day, and everything is underlined and dog-eared and circled, and I laughed so hard at some bits that were just so natural that they could’ve happened with me. Everything resonated with me, and there were Nerdfighteria inside jokes spread out everywhere.
It was such a fun adventure, and John Green was just marvellous capturing a teenager’s voice (They swear! They’re rude! They make stupid sex jokes! I do those things too!), and look, I’m gushing. I loved it, maybe because I’m the target demographic, maybe because it’s enthralling and fun. Just read it.
PS: Regarding leaving high school - “This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.”
Read from March 18th to March 19th, 2011.