Paper Towns

by John Green

I was kind of disappointed in this one. Until now, the only book I had read by John Green was The Fault in Our Stars and I kind of lost my shit over that book. I still have yet to see that movie, although I really want to. So when I heard that Paper Towns was going to be the next John Green book to be made into a film, I immediately put it at the top of my to-read list.

It was only OK. I can't say I loved it or hated it. Just that it contains more of the teenage whining than I can really handle. The Fault in Our Stars had a surprising lack of whining, despite the fact that it was about kids dying of cancer who totally have the right to whine their hearts out.

In Paper Towns, the whining might be warranted, but I'm less sure as to why. This girl (Margot) runs away from home (not for the first time) right before she's about to graduate from high school. The main character (Quentin) has always had a huge crush on Margot, even though they haven't hung out since grade school. So while he's trying to find Margot after she disappears, Quentin spends a lot of time wondering if he ever really knew her.

It's a valid question. How many of you have fallen in love with someone, only to realize that they are not at all the person you thought they were? Did they change, or had you been assuming they were what you wanted them to be? There's a lot to be said for the fact that they way we treat people is based on our perceptions of them, rather than how they really are, and I'm sure that goes double for self-centered teenagers. It's also why we tend to act differently around different people. Our friends expect us to behave differently from our parents, whose expectations are different from our teachers/boss.

So Quentin spends a lot of time learning about himself and other people and poetry. And whining. Because Margot has run off before and has been known to be a bit of an attention whore, everyone else pretty much goes back to resuming their regularly scheduled end of senior year. This upsets Quentin because he thinks everyone should care as much he does about his idealized Margot, even though you could probably argue that they know her better than he does by not worrying about her. If she wants to come back, she'll come back. If not, she can take care of herself.

I won't ruin the ending for you, but I will tell you that I'm not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, I kind of liked it. It was pretty romantic, but it was also unsatisfying. I think it was meant to be unsatisfying, but that doesn't make me feel any better about it. All I can say is that Quentin probably did more growing as a character in the four weeks that we see him than he did in the rest of his high school career.