Paper Towns by John Green

Summary: Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back 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 of the girl he thought he knew.

Review: It's like this: When I'm constantly hearing people talk about something, be it a book or a movie or whatever, I can only go so long before I need to check it out for myself.

Which is basically why I read Paper Towns. John Green kept filming vlogbrothers videos from the set of the movie, so I figured it was time to read the book. (Which is also why I bought and reread The Fault in Our Stars that one time.)

I think I've mentioned previously that I'm kind of over John Green's Preciously Clever Teenagers. But mostly because I used to be one, and those days are pretty much over for me (what with my ten-year high school reunion coming up this summer. Seriously, where does the time go?). In fact, I was thinking how weird it is that there are always these characters with a nickname that has literally nothing to do with their name, but every single person calls them by that nickname and knows some weird story about why they got it. And I was like, who is like that? Who even does that? And then I remembered a friend I went to high school with who went by Hot Sauce for no apparent reason but every single person called him that. And also a kid who was such a big fan of University of Alabama football that he went by Bama, and there were kids who didn't even know that his real name was Josh. So... John Green gets a pass, because I guess that really happens.

Paper Towns was interesting. It said some things to me about people, and about how you never really know what's going on inside someone's head. It also kind of made me want to read Leaves of Grass, maybe?

I liked Margo. I liked how Quentin worked so hard to figure her out, and he thought he saw beyond what she showed people and saw deep into her soul and stuff, and then at the end he realized that he'd done it wrong and read too much into a ton of random stuff. Margo, as seen by Quentin, is a lot more real and complicated than she seems, but also less mysterious and unattainable than she seems, too.

Random thought: I HATE books that are written in first person, but you don't know what the main character's name is. Like, after you've finished it. Have you read books like that? Where you can't remember the MC's name because the book was in first person and they just didn't say their name enough? This book isn't like that, although it's kind of close: I kept getting thrown off every time somebody called him "Q," because he called himself Quentin too much. I always thought of that as his name. Anyway.

I've said it before, but bear with me: I think I'm getting a little too old for YA books. My unofficial New Year resolution (I know it's February, but I finished Paper Towns back in December) is to read more grown-up type books. (Spoiler: So far it's going well.)

Goodreads Shelves: addictive, bechdel-test, fluffy, funny, is-a-movie, is-this-a-kissing-book, my-kind-of-woman, nook-ya, pretentious, thought-provoking

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