Paper Towns review

The other day I finished reading Paper Towns.  Great book!  As I posted on Twitter & Plurk, it was funny, sad, and deep, sometimes all at once.

I liked all the characters, which may or may not have been John Green’s purpose.  The morale of the story is that people are people.  We have a habit of seeing people as almost godlike or as animals, forgetting that everyone has good and bad traits.  In the video that I recorded of him in Orlando, he quoted Walk Whitman “I contain multitudes” and he went on saying that he is both ugly and hot, smart and stupid.

One cool thing that John did in the book was quote from a few past sources, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (a good amount of Song of Myself from “the Whitman” ), Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and T.S Elliot.  A bit of Greek mythology.

Although it’s written for the young adult audience, I really liked it.  It’s written in first person, about a group of teens, Quentin (written from his point of view), his best friend Ben, Radar, Lacey, and Margo Roth Spiegelman.  Most of the story is about Quentin finding Margo after she goes missing.  As he’s finding clues and figuring out where she is, he also finds out who she really is.

And I was able to successfully fight the temptation of jumping to the end to find out if Margo is alive.  It was tough.

Does he find her? Alive? Ahhh… to find that out, I recommend reading the book 😉

I also will be letting Kristi read the book as well when she is old enough. As John told me, “not for a few more years”. Nothing really dirty, just a few teen related things that a 9 year old is not ready for yet.

Posted in Uncategorized Tagged with: book, book review, first person, John Green, mystery, Nerd Fighter, Paper Towns, teen, Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie