Paper Towns - John Green

Initial Rating: 7/10

Before I post this, let me just say that this review (and many of the others that are to follow) is based on notes taken MUCH earlier in the summer when I read this book. I don’t remember some of what I meant, and it’s been too long to write a fresh review, so this is what I have to go with… It’s going to be confusing/ not make sense, and I apologize, but maybe if you just read it, you’ll be able to get something out of it?

First of all, things I liked. I loved the connection in this story to Walt Whitman, and I actually really like how the characters fail to really reach what Whitman may have wanted, particularly with interations with Margo. Q really is an isolated string, in a way.

I liked the deep level that John Green seemed to be working on, but at the same time, the story to me lacked a bit of realism. Would they really be able to find Margo? Maybe? I mean, I guess the stakes are high. Q thinks she’s dead or may kill herself. And along the way he does realize things he doesn’t understand and manages to find her and, more importantly, himself. However, the lack of consequences make all that emotional digging seem less realistic. ALL of the characters seem to get away with basically everything without much happening in response, even after making serious threats. I do like the coming together of different social groups at the end of the year; however, it happened a LOT less dramatically my own senior year (although not exactly at the level portrayed). The back and forth between places during the clue search also felt a bit tedious to me. The clues, too, didn’t seem very follow-able to me; they seemed to make major leaps and assumptions, which made it difficult for me to believe.

Sometimes I get Q, but at other times his dialogue didn’t seem to match his interiority at all. Q became a kind of Ahab with his obsession with Margo. Whereas the love interest between Stephanie Perkins’ characters in Anna and the French Kiss was believable and charming, this was another “boy dreams of out-of-reach girl” deal to me. Really, in the end, all of these characters, places, and events are paper people, paper places in a story. It’s what we put into them as readers that makes them meaningful (as car ride commentary can show). Our reactions to them reveal more about what we want/ expect than even that. For example, I feel like the ending was perfect however much I want to fight it. Of course I was rooting for Margo to be found, come back, and fall in love with Q, but what happens fits with their true personalities. I enjoy consistencies between Green’s stories, such as the pranks, awkward male protagonists, and road trips, but I sometimes wish he would break away from such familiarities.

In the end, I realize, it comes down to that never-ending battle between realism and depth that all major young adult novels (all novels in general) must face. While this is clearly one of the deeper of Green’s stories, some of the believability suffers. Reaching a balance between the two points seems difficult, and I don’t know if I have read a story that has truly reached it.