John Green: Paper Towns

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Speak; Reprint edition (September 22, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 014241493X

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...
 
 Paper Towns was not as inspiring as I was anticipating, but I believe that was more because John Green has been hyped to me so much. I think he is a brilliant individual, but I was overestimating the amount of revelatory and inspirational material one can jam into a young adult novel. Taking that into account, the novel was hilarious and well-written. It did have its deep moments interspersed in the flotsam of the life of a teenager dealing with graduating from high school.
 The novel is more about the impossibility of truly knowing another person than the horrors of entering the world with at least half of your strings cut as a supposed adult. When Margo Roth Spiegelman (the girls whose name you must say in its entirety) runs away from her hometown of Orlando, her childhood friend spends an inordinate amount of time worrying that she might have committed suicide. The story revolves around his search for Margo and learning about her through the clues she has left for him. Unfortunately, he realizes that the image he's had of Margo for all these years is not the real Margo. That's the problem of humanity.
 The novel is paced fairly well, but there were times that I just wished he'd get to the point. Quentin, the protagonist, spends so much time pondering the Walt Whitman poem around which all of his revelations about Margo center that it just gets redundant. He also can't get through the poem until almost the end of the novel, which, if he had actually focused and finished it, could have led to the finding of Margo much quicker. On the other hand, that gave us more time with the ridiculous side characters, who provided 90% of the humor of the novel. And the humor was great. It reminded me of me and my friends.
 Overall: A-