Paper Towns, by John Green

Synopsis: 

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life — dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge — he follows.

After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues — and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees of the girl he thought he knew.

John Green never disappoints me, no matter what I read. From TFIOS to An Abundance of Katherines, they are all special in their unique ways. Only John Green can make us laugh, cry and think so deeply with the same page. And Paper Towns was a perfect example of it. 

There’s a problem in this book with verb tenses. Chapter nine in the second part was in present tense, suddenly, when everything had been in past tense and will continue from chapter ten in past tense. That shocked me, because I started reading the chapter and I knew something was different, but it took me some time to notice the verb tenses. And then, the third part is all in present, but that’s fine. The third part was my favorite. The road trip, epic. 

The characters are greatly developed, and real, which is the most important thing. Everyone has their virtues and, more importantly, their flaws, and that’s what I love about John Green’s books. Even Q wonders why he is friends with Ben when he ends up drunk at that party and all that, but Radar reminds him that we should like people for what they are, not because of what we want them to be, and that’s a huge lesson in life. They speak the truth, and that’s pretty valuable. 

Paper Towns tells a story about friendship, love and identity, and it’s full of deep characters that evolve throughout the novel (which is what I value the most) in a very common environment that makes it possible to identify ourselves with them. 

When Margo disappeared, I knew she was going to be disappointing. All those comments Ben made about how she just wanted them to keep her as the centre of their worlds, how she just wanted to be the centre of attention, was exactly as I expected the ending to be. Then we find out she didn’t put those clues out for them to find them, and that she didn’t want to be found. And then Q finally learns that Margo doesn’t exist, not as they want her to be. And that’s what the book is about. There’s a different Margo for every one of them, and that’s what happens in real life. We see things and people the way we’d like them to be, and most of the time, they turn up to be very different from what we imagined them to be like. And that disappoints us. But that’s how we are, that’s how life is, and that’s what John Green is trying to show us. 

The book was fresh, written in this John Green way of his that I’ve learned to know and love. I loved learning about paper towns and contemplating philosophical questions about one’s identity. If you love John Green or simply enjoy new but at the same time old stories, this is your book.