Review: Paper Towns by John Green
Started Reading: October 25, 2020
Finished Reading: November 3, 2020
Book Summary:
Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs 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 the girl he thought he knew…
Going into this novel, I didn’t know very much about John Green’s writing style. I knew that he writes predominantly in the Young Adult / Teen milieu, and that one of his books was recently adapted to a movie (The Fault in Our Stars). Beyond that, I’ve heard him speak about mental illness on some podcasts. In short I was a blank slate going into the novel. It turns out that’s a good thing, because apparently many of his characters share the same traits and personalities.
That aside, it was immediately clear to me that Quentin and Margo were each made up of some sort of template; Quentin was the shy kid who has a long, unrequited love for his next-door neighbour Margo – who herself is the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”. The first part of the book details a night of revenge, as mentioned in the back-of-the-book summary, and then the second and third parts of the book deal with the aftermath of Margo disappearing with no indication of returning.
Initially when I reviewed this book on GoodReads, I gave it two stars and knocked it for characters I didn’t believe in. I liked the story, but hated the dialog. I think I would still give it two stars, but in thinking about it I’ve come around a little bit on one character at least: Margo. At the beginning of the novel, she’s this completely unbelievable girl who is amazing at everything she does. She’s immensely popular at school, and is able to keep the school population in check – to the point of making sure bullies don’t pick on certain people. When she disappears, the high school “ecosystem” falls apart and Quentin puts it back together with what he learns from both his night with Margo and what he learns in trying to find her again.
But then…the book deconstructs her character. Quentin realizes that the girl he thought he knew really wasn’t who she is. She leaves clues for him to find her, which starts out as a search for her physical location, and eventually turns into a journey to discover the real person behind the mask she puts up for everyone else. There are points along the way where Quentin (and myself, following along) truly thought she might have committed suicide and that what she was leaving behind was actually an elaborate suicide note. That wasn’t the case, though I wonder what outcome would have been more “realistic”.
I appreciated that Quentin made some growth from where he started to where he ended up. I really, really disliked the dialog between Quentin and his friends, but his internal thoughts are more tolerable to me. I’m very glad that the bulk of the story did not take place in a school setting – those scenes were not fun to read for me. I don’t think I can complain too much about how the characters act, because I realize that while this is not a “fantasy” or “sci-fi” genre novel exactly, the story is a kind of fantasy.
None of the characters in the book would probably exist in real life. I would allow that maybe Margo might – or at least I could believe that someone may be entirely different than how they present themselves to society. Feeling trapped somewhere feels like something very real to me, so on that front – I give the book a pass.
After writing out this review, I think I might bump my star rating to 2.5 out of 5 instead of simply 2. It’s not my favourite book by any means, but it was easy to read and get through. It was fairly light-hearted (which I didn’t fully expect after the book starts with the main characters as 9-year-olds discovering a man who committed suicide). It’s not something I would call a waste of time, but it’s not something I would recommend either. There are better books out there.
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