Paragraph Seven

I finished reading Paper Towns by John Green last night. The book is brilliant. I had my doubts but this particular "vlog brother" reminded me of what it is to live, to love and to be a friend all in two short days through a teen fiction novel. I find it kind of funny that while a teen myself I read and re-read classic literature and my favorite author was Boccaccio but here I am in the latter half of my twenties reading one "young adult" novel after another.

Paper Towns exposes the sticky sweet melodrama of the teenage years in suburbia just as well as Stephen Chbosky’s Perks of Being a Wallflower did in 1999, though Quentin tells his story through the search of a childhood crush who has gone missing rather than by writing letters to an anonymous reader as Charlie did. Quentin’s last month of his senior year is the kind of month that interrupts your life and changes everything, he misses his graduation (at which he and his two friends had decided to go naked under their gowns) to hunt down a girl who had gone missing a month earlier and had until graduation day largely been assumed dead. The story however is not so much in the search for Margo but in the discovery of Quentin, Radar, Ben and Lacey who Margo had abruptly left behind in their McMansion filled Orlando suburb.

Green capably expresses the anxiety and the excitement of love and growing up with the aid of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself and manages to make (at least in my case) the reader long for the discovery of new life and the thrill of coming adulthood. The book was difficult to put down and the emotions stirred were impossible to ignore. Paper Towns has all the wit of Sarah Vowel with out the history and the friendships are the kind of friendships a person can’t just make up. Reading this book made me want to go on a road trip, rediscover myself and reconnect with old friends rarely spoken to but hardly forgotten. I laughed out loud, cried a little and gasped with shock multiple times while reading about Quentin’s obsession with finding Margo and his antics with the kind of friends that become a sort of family. I am glad to say that I did not read this book in public, my reaction to the pages in Paper Towns most likely would have been quite embarrassing. There is no question what so ever about if I will read Greens two previous novels An Abundance of Kathrin’s and Looking for Alaska, both are already on reserve at the library.

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