Title: Paper Towns
Author: John Green
Publisher: Bloomsbury (UK) | Penguin (USA)
Publication: May 2010 (UK) | 22 Sep 2009 (USA)
Format: Paperback | 320 pages
Genre: YA
Who is the real Margo?
Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs 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 the girl he thought he knew...
My thoughts:
Paper Towns follows Quentin who is just an average guy about to graduate from high school. After an exciting night out during which he helps execute Margo Roth Spiegelman's perfectly planned stages of revenge against her high school enemies, Quentin finds himself following a trail of breadcrumbs to find the love of his life before she disappears entirely.
When I started to get into the story I never thought it would turn out the way it did. It began with a series of fun high school pranks but quickly turned into John Green's usual expressive and eloquent writing when Quentin starts on his emotional journey to discover more about himself and the girl he loves.
John Green has this way of writing that almost coerces me into reading certain paragraphs over and over again and sometimes even find a different way of understanding it every time I do. This book was no exception and I loved it for that very reason. In fact, I'm starting to believe that every book John ever writes deserves to be read just for the reason that his writing is pure brilliance - you can never tire of it.
The book is in no way as simple as the premise is. Most of it is about discovering yourself and other people. It has this unbelievable depth to it that will leave you thinking about life itself and how you see others for a while after finishing. It's pretty philosophical.
I loved how the whole book seems to revolve around finding Margo. It's non-stop trying to figure out where she is and what she has planned but you soon realise that Margo is the little speck of dust in the grand scheme of things. Every character, especially Quentin, realises this towards the end and they all come to their own conclusions about what they consider to hold great consequences in their individual lives and what they consider to be their 'paper towns' and 'paper people'. It is most definitely an incredibly clever story that keeps you on your toes in the sense that you are forced to think about things in a way that we don't normally in our day to day lives.
This is a definite must read. The book is full of great characters, a great plot, ingenious writing and above all a book that stays with you for a long time after finishing.
My rating: 10/10
John Green:
1 comment:
Wow this sounds like a good coming of age book :)
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