Paper Towns

Paper Towns John Green 320pp.

John Green’s Paper Towns is a wonderful, pithy exploration of the way we view our friends and the people we interact with. The novel tells the story of Quentin Jacobsen, a somewhat nerdy high school student, chasing after Margo Roth Spiegelman, the love of his life.

At the risk of calling too much attention to the way I am writing these reviews, the second sentence up there is exactly the issue that John Green is exploring in this novel. When I portrayed Quentin and Margo to you, I did so by epitomizing them in a very brief and one-dimensional description. While this is entirely understandable in the case of priming a review through a presentation of the characters, it becomes troublesome when we apply this in real life. Quentin spends the entire book understanding Margo through a variety of lenses, picturing her in a sequence of different, equally inaccurate simplifications.

This development of Quentin’s view of Margo is paralleled neatly as he follows after her disappearance through a series of clues and riddles. Every possible piece of information that Quentin can find which suggests a possible motive or destination for Margo’s disappearance shortly before the end of her high school career is analyzed, turned over, and twisted about. Dozens of paper Margos come and go through the course of the novel, none of which accurately portray the woman they so desperately desire to represent.

In some ways, this chase draws comparisons to novels like The DaVinci code, at the very least through a structural lens; but the essential nature of the novel causes it to stand apart. Paper Towns bears more resemblance to a philosophical tract than an action-mystery thriller. Green’s writing does lend itself to those comparisons with hints at suicide to raise the stakes, but not for a moment do those implications seem substantiated by the information in the text.

Paper Towns was a very enjoyable book to read, an excellent blurring of the lines between Young Adult fiction, which it is undoubtedly marketed as, and a “real” novel. The nuance of character development, and frankly even the specific aspect of human nature which Green chooses to explore push the novel out of the Young Adult category for me, and I think they problematize any easy definitions of either genre for any reader.

Would I recommend Paper Towns? Yes.

Score: 4.2/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? Had I not checked it out from the library, absolutely.

-DFTBA, Mr. Cheddar.