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Paper Towns, by John Green, is the story about two dynamic characters: Quentin Jacobsen and his childhood friend, Margo Roth Spiegelman. This young adult fiction takes place at a Florida High School and during the last few weeks of Margo and Quentin's senior year. Margo is known around the school as an adventurous, intelligent, and a highly admired person. Quentin admires her from afar for most of his life. One night she appears at his room asking him to go on night ride to do crazy exploits, and he can't help but feel free from his mundane life and happy to be a part of her life. But the next morning, Margo disappears off the face of Florida. She left him a string of clues to find out where she is, how he can find her, and possibly search for what he's looking for and how to live life to the fullest. John Green is an amazing young adult writer. He graduated from Kenyon College with a double major in English and Religious Studies. He has worked for the Booklist Magazine, The New York Times Books Review, WBEZ's All Things Considered, and KnogMeg Magazine. He was won two Printz awards, an Edgar award, and the Corine Literature prize. He has also been featured as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize, number five in the New York Times Bestsellers List, one of the top ten in ALA's 2005 Best Book for Young Adults, and is currently number 1 on Amazon and Barnes and Noble's bestseller lists (with 150,000 pre orders ordered and counting). His new book, The Fault in Our Stars, will be out on January 10, 2012 (Youtube blog: Vlogbrothers and johngreenbooks.com). The way this book was written was clever, witty, and with an intriguing plot that can be easily relatable, from adolescents to adults who are still looking at the world, wondering who they truly are and how they can live in a strange, yet fascinating, society. We, as a society, usually conform to the idea that being pretty or being intelligent determines how successful our lives will be. In the book, according to the main character, choosing your friends based on those ideas "always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste" (Quentin Jacobsen, p. 25). Instead, we should really look our outside appearances to see that we all have that Margo-esque character inside of us. In the book, when Quentin finally realizes that Margo is not the person he thinks she is. He realizes that, "The fundamental mistake I had always made- and that she had, in fairness, always left me to make - was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl" (Quentin Jacobsen p. 199).The author uses modern dialogue and language to portray each character in order to create a casual, but realistic, tone in the story. I couldn't get over how much I loved the characters and how their dialogue seemed not too far off from reality. Green's characterization is brilliant by adding and highlighting the distinguishing features that make us human, such as Quentin being a social outcast and his sense of loneliness that a lot of teenagers can relate to. How Green creates his story plot is even more amazing when every single event that happens would always lead to another without stopping, each with their moments of suspense, quirkiness, and complete contemplation. The detailed passages in every section were very intricate and have a flowing theme throughout the whole story, which is self-discovery. I also love how Green's writing is almost like a poem that could be published just by itself. John Green has done it again. Paper Towns is a book that I cannot stop picking up and reading over again. This book has so many connections that many young adults can relate to and how we are all constantly searching for ourselves. Although we've lived where we are today, we always know that everything is just paper and soon we will move on to find solid ground. To quote from the book,"From here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those culs-de-sac, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters" (Margo p. 57-58).If you have not heard of John Green, I recommend you to read his books by picking Paper Towns as your first. It's smart, funny, and reveals the true human nature through the eyes of a character with dynamic features. I guarantee you will read this book two times a day.
