Paper Towns by John Green

Release date: October 16th, 2008
Publisher: Dutton Juvenile
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary
Pages: 305
Source: Checked out at my local library
Links: Amazon | Goodreads
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When Margo Roth Spiegelman beckons Quentin Jacobsen in the middle of the night - dressed like a ninja and plotting an ingenious campaign of revenge - he follows her. Margo's always planned extravagantly, and, until now, she's always planned solo. After a lifetime of loving Margo from afar, things are finally looking up for Q . . . until day breaks and she has vanished. Always an enigma, Margo has now become a mystery. But there are clues. And they're for Q.

I am on a bit of a John Green streak here. This is my third John Green novel reviewed in three weeks, and I've got my reviews of Will Grayson, Will Grayson and The Fault in Our Stars coming up on the next two Thursdays. I had not heard much about Paper Towns before picking it up at the library, but I actually ended up liking it even more than the much hyped Looking for Alaska.

After Margo drags Q along for an epic night that includes revenge, breaking and entering and dead fish (!), Q thinks he might finally have a shot with the girl he's been in love with forever. The next morning she is gone. I think I loved the mystery of Margo Roth Spiegelman as much as Q did. She is unpredictable, fun and the kind of person everyone loves being around because she makes everything more, somehow. At the same time she is incredibly selfish - who disappears like that, leaving her friends to worry?

I absolutely loved Q. He's that cute kind of nerdy, he hangs out with the band geeks even if he's not in the band, and he's so incredibly insightful for an eighteen-year-old boy! When he finds the first clue Margo left behind he never questions if he should try to find her, he just goes for it. Along for the ride are his two best friends, Ben and Radar, and Margo's friend Lacey. As expected in a John Green novel, the supporting characters are as well written as the main ones, and I just loved how, especially the three boys, felt like real friends. Not perfect book-friends - real friends that argue and get annoyed with each other and laugh and tell stupid jokes and have fun.

I don't usually post long quotes in my reviews, but this is just so accurate and beautiful and well-thought that I have to. (No spoilers, this happens early in the book.) Reading Margo's definition of a paper town felt like reading about the place where I grew up, and it really just made me understand her in a way I don't think Q could.

“Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those culs-de-sac, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.”

I would love to tell you exactly what Paper Towns is about, but I really think it's a little different for every person reading this book. For some it can be a discovery of friendship, and of how far you are willing to go for your friends. For me it became about leaving. About leaving what you've always known so you can find something that really matters. It's exactly what I did when I moved from my small-town in Norway to Colorado, and Margo just helped me remember why I made that choice. And that really is the best kind of book - the kind that takes you where you need to go.