PAPER TOWNS by John Green (Review)

STATUS: Stand-alone novel (Huzzah!)

AUTHOR: John Green

GENRE: Young Adult Realistic Fiction/Coming-of-Age Story

PUBLISHER: Speak (imprint of Penguin) in 2008

LOVE TRIANGLE: Nope! (Refreshing!)

PAGES: 305

"He has all kinds of problems -- just like anyone. I know it's impossible for you to see peers this way, but when you're older, you start to see them -- the bad kids and the good kids and all kids -- as people. They're just people who deserve to be cared for. Varying degrees of sick, varying degrees of neurotic, varying degrees of self-actualization." --Q's Mom

[Note: I think it's very telling of where I am in life that the quote I pulled came from Q's mom, and not from Q or from Margo.]

I remember the first time I heard about John Green and his cult following. I was at a conference, and a group of us were out to dinner at a TGI Friday’s, of all places. I don’t remember how we got on the topic – maybe someone was presenting on John Green, I’m not sure – but the conversation got really enthusiastic really quick. At that point, I head heard of John Green, but I had never read any of his work.

That weekend, I went home and downloaded An Abundance of Katherines onto my Kindle. I didn’t love it.

Fast forward a few years to 2014, when The Fault in Our Stars was hitting theaters. I decided to read the book before seeing the film, and I loved it—bawled my eyes out.

So with Paper Towns coming out this summer, I decided to do the same thing and read the book ahead of the theatrical release. And, again, I didn’t love it. 

Don’t get me wrong – there were parts of it that I really, really liked. But I’m wondering…a few of the reviews that I did skim compared Paper Towns to An Abundance of Katherines and I wonder if that doesn’t explain it, at least partly.

Most of my “quibbles” come from Part II. I really enjoyed Part I, a.k.a. Q and Margo’s Night of Questionable-Quasi-Illegal Fun. Their friendship is an all-too-real phenomenon: two people who are close in childhood, but, usually around puberty, something changes and the friendship…fades. Sometimes they still acknowledge each other when they pass in high school halls, sometimes things are more hostile. So when Margo crawls through Q’s bedroom window and successfully convinces him to be her accomplice as she wreaks havoc  on the ones she’s feel have wronged her, I was rooting for them. I'm a sucker like that. I mean, c’mon. They broke into Sea World together!

Part III, a.k.a. The Road Trip That Gave Us The Dreidel Episode, though, was my favorite. The road trip Q & Co. took was one of the most dynamic, engaging passages of the whole book, and I can’t wait to see it translated into film. (Although I do wonder if the whole Radar-wearing-a-Confederate-Flag-shirt episode will make it into the film.) Perhaps it’s a little cheesy, but I told you I was a sucker: I like road trips and I like that Ben and Lacey overcame high-school-clique rigidity to get together – and stay together, at least for now. And I even liked the ending. While I’m a sucker for happy endings, I don’t need one in a book to love it.

But there are sometimes when I feel like I’m “missing something” when I read John Green’s work…like he goes to this deep, philosophical, profound place, and I’m still paddling around in the shallow end of the book.

Either way, Part II, a.k.a. Q-spends-an-inordinate-amount-of-time-moping-after-and-searching-for-Margo, dragged on a bit too long for me. It was easy to put Paper Towns down at this point and I didn’t really feel a strong desire to keep going. After all, there’s only so many times a girl can read about a character (1) driving around abandoned subdivisions looking for Margo; (2) hanging out in a sketchy abandoned strip mall looking for Margo; and (3) reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass – yep, you guessed it – looking for Margo. And I realize that this was, arguably, the most important part of the book: the part where Q learns that the Margo he’s loved/is in love with is (I think) an illusion. That she’s the Margo he wants her to be, or that she’s the Margo high school wants her to be, but she’s not the Margo she wants to be. Hence the disappearing act.

Don't get me wrong – I think this a great point – especially for high school students. So much of high school identity is wrapped up in perception and other people’s opinions – there’s a pressure to conform, to assimilate, to squash down those bits of individuality for fear of being marked as different or weird. So, in the end, when Ben and Lacey get together – and when he realizes that she’s not the girl he thought she was either – or when Radar and Angela get together, or when Q effectively dismantles the high school hierarchy and fights for those at the bottom, I appreciated that. I just didn’t fully appreciate the journey it took Q to get there. I’d probably compare it to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when Harry, Ron, and Hermione are traipsing around in the woods, searching for Horcruxes/Hallows and evading the Death Eaters. It doesn't take up that much narrative space, but it feels so much longer than it actually is, because it’s so repetitive – while there are variations in the plot, the basic gist is the same.

So I’m 1 for 3 on John Green novels – and the two I didn’t love, I didn’t strongly dislike either. I’ll definitely pick up Looking For Alaska at some point in the near future.