Book Review: Paper Towns by John Green

I’ve read three books by John Green before this one (see my reviews of The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska) so it’s safe to say that I enjoy his writing. Green captures teens well, finding that balance between realism and fiction to keep the story interesting.

Our main character here is Quentin, known as Q, living in Florida, weeks away from graduating high school. Q lives next door to and has been in love with Margo Roth Spiegelman (who he, rather annoyingly, mostly refers to by her complete name) for the majority of his life. They run in very different social circles and so Q’s love burns from afar, flames fanned by the epic tales of Margo’s adventures that circulate the school. And then, one night, Margo shows up at his window and invites Q into an adventure.

Q thinks this is the moment that will change their relationship and his life but, instead, the next morning Margo has vanished. Following a series of clues, Q becomes obsessed with finding Margo and draws his friends – and some of Margo’s – into his search.

This is really a story about how well you can know another person, how much you can expect from another person, and what might happen when you build a regular human being up into something superhuman. It’s about what forms us as people (or at least as teenagers) and how much we can form ourselves.

A long line of cars trailed behind me, and I felt anxious about holding them up; I marvelled at how I could still have room to worry about such petty, ridiculous crap as whether the guy in the SUV behind me thought I was an excessively cautious driver. I wanted Margo’s disappearance to change me; but it hadn’t, not really.

It’s all an interesting idea and the book is an easy, relatively quick read. It’s not as strong as Green’s other novels, however, and some of the sections drag on too long. For a while, Q believes that Margo is hiding somewhere in an unfinished Florida subdivision and for what feels like a large part of the book, he wanders through these “pseudovisions”. While this is initially interesting and makes for a great, visual setting, it’s not something that gets more interesting upon repetition and Green keeps it going for too long. In the same vein, Q and some of his friends take a road trip toward the end of the novel that probably doesn’t need to be tracked hour by hour and yet it is.

The final conclusion to Margo’s mystery is rather clever, with an interesting tidbit of information. It’s an odd combination of tidy wrap-up and unhappy ending that mostly works.

While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this book that’s more because John Green has other and better novels than because Paper Towns is a bad book. For a Green fan, it’s an interesting read in combination with Looking for Alaska (see: Manic Pixie Dream Girls and their repercussions) but if you’re reading Green for the first time or only want to read one book by him, stick with The Fault in Our Stars.