Book Review: "Paper Towns" by John Green

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Paper Towns by John Green follows the story of high school senior Quentin Jacobson, who has been in love with Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar since they were children growing up together. Quentin and Margo bonded when she showed up at his window, in the middle of the night, looking for revenge on her "frienemies", as they could be called, and seeking his help in doing so. Shortly thereafter their all-nighter, Margo goes missing. This is not uncommon for Margo, as she was always seeking new adventures. She would often run away from home, but she would leave clues behind, because she always wanted to be found. Quentin devotes the remainder of his senior year to finding Margo, but will he find her alive?

I read Paper Towns a few weeks ago. The book was filled with suspense, caused by the constant "Is she alive? She's alive! No, she's dead!" questions that John Green poses in your mind. I have read almost all of John Green's novels to date (currently working on An Abundance of Katherines), and he has never once disappointed me. John Green is an emotionally stable adult, or so he poses, yet he can capture adolescent instability so perfectly in his books. I hate to say it, but it's like he understands what it's like to be a teenager without forgetting as he matures, as most adults do, which is something that I enjoy in young adult novels.

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Anyway, Paper Towns was a very suspenseful book. Q, as Quentin is referred to often in the book, is always looking for Margo. He even recruits her friends to help. He finds clues as to her location, but he never can put the pieces together. He remembers something she said, on the night that they exacted Margo's revenge, "The towns were paper, but the memories were not." This leads him to believe that she was somewhere that she had fond memories of. And so, Q follows Margo's trail of clues, trying to find her, as he always does, but he never can. Every clue that she left was a dead end, so it seemed.

I am trying my very best not to give away any clues to how the story ends, because I definitely recommend reading it, or any of John Green's novels.

"Here's what's not beautiful about it: 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." - John Green, Paper Towns

 sources: http://johngreenbooks.com/paper-towns/
http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3364505-paper-towns