![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Book review: Paper Towns, by John Green
Jan. 17th, 2014 07:42 pmI wish I'd had this book to read when I was a teenager.
Normally, when I say that about a book, it's because the story is one that I would have liked much more as a teenager than as an adult. And it's certainly true that this one would have resonated strongly with my teenage self - I also grew up in a heavily artificialized suburban environment, and had similar trouble feeling like there was any way I could establish my identity independent of the role created for me by my social group and my lifestyle.
However, the themes in this one - of interconnectedness, of the joys and difficulties of friendship, and of the tension between our perceptions of each other and their actualities, as well as our perceptions of ourselves and others' perceptions of us - are universal enough that even now, more than a decade removed from the age that Quentin and his friends are navigating, I was completely caught up in their story.
It's not quite a perfect book. Probably the biggest turnoff for some folks will be the deliberate pacing; it takes its time setting up the characters, letting us get to know them. And though I couldn't point to a specific one at the moment, I suspect there's a scene or two during that setup that could've been cut. However, I guarantee you that it's worth reading through them - without getting into spoiler territory, the Big Final Sequence pays off all of that character-building time with interest, as we watch these people we've gotten to know ping-pong off each others' personalities in increasingly hysterical ways. The entire last hour-and-a-half of the audiobook had me in stitches.
I've seen a lot of comparisons to Looking for Alaska, and it's true that there are several of the same themes explored and a lot of the same dynamics between Margo and Quentin. But I think this one feels much more complete, better fleshed-out. I loved that the object of desire was also a character in her own right, who even got a chance to assert said right. And as tragic and unnecessary as it might have seemed to my YA self, my older-and-wiser self especially loved seeing a portrayal of how Troo Luv isn't enough for a relationship to happen - that people have to be in similar places, with similar values and desires, to make a relationship work.
I may not have gotten to read this as a teenager, but it's deep enough that, frankly, it resonated with my adult self now even more than it would have then. Thank you, John Green, for telling me another of my new favorite stories. A
Normally, when I say that about a book, it's because the story is one that I would have liked much more as a teenager than as an adult. And it's certainly true that this one would have resonated strongly with my teenage self - I also grew up in a heavily artificialized suburban environment, and had similar trouble feeling like there was any way I could establish my identity independent of the role created for me by my social group and my lifestyle.
However, the themes in this one - of interconnectedness, of the joys and difficulties of friendship, and of the tension between our perceptions of each other and their actualities, as well as our perceptions of ourselves and others' perceptions of us - are universal enough that even now, more than a decade removed from the age that Quentin and his friends are navigating, I was completely caught up in their story.
It's not quite a perfect book. Probably the biggest turnoff for some folks will be the deliberate pacing; it takes its time setting up the characters, letting us get to know them. And though I couldn't point to a specific one at the moment, I suspect there's a scene or two during that setup that could've been cut. However, I guarantee you that it's worth reading through them - without getting into spoiler territory, the Big Final Sequence pays off all of that character-building time with interest, as we watch these people we've gotten to know ping-pong off each others' personalities in increasingly hysterical ways. The entire last hour-and-a-half of the audiobook had me in stitches.
I've seen a lot of comparisons to Looking for Alaska, and it's true that there are several of the same themes explored and a lot of the same dynamics between Margo and Quentin. But I think this one feels much more complete, better fleshed-out. I loved that the object of desire was also a character in her own right, who even got a chance to assert said right. And as tragic and unnecessary as it might have seemed to my YA self, my older-and-wiser self especially loved seeing a portrayal of how Troo Luv isn't enough for a relationship to happen - that people have to be in similar places, with similar values and desires, to make a relationship work.
I may not have gotten to read this as a teenager, but it's deep enough that, frankly, it resonated with my adult self now even more than it would have then. Thank you, John Green, for telling me another of my new favorite stories. A
