Paper Towns

Would you ever leave your home to find your best friend? That’s what Quentin did with his friend Margo in the book Paper Towns.  In this book Margo Roth Spiegelman plans an all-nighter revenge plot and asks, old friend, Quentin to help.  The revenge plot goes well but the next day she goes missing, so Quentin goes on a mission to find Margo, following the mysterious clues she leaves behind.  Quentin and his friends travel up the east coast to find where Margo and her secrets might be hiding.  I thought this was an amazing and fun book for many reasons.

Let’s start with the characters.  The author John Green portrays the characters in a way that makes you think that they are real.  Their actions and dialogue make you forget that the author is obviously not a teenager.  Even though the story is not in any way cliche the two main characters slightly are.  Q (Quentin) is the nerdy, quiet, and quirky, guy; he hangs out with the band geeks and sometimes over thinks things, while on the other hand Margo is the high spirited, fun, and the popular, pretty girl who has all the guys lining up for her.  All Margo really wants though is an adventure.  

Next is the description in this book.  For example: I crawl into a room lined with clothing racks, the stainless-steel poles still bolted into walls wine-stained with water damage...there are several holes in the roof, tar paper hangs down, and I can see places where the roof sags against exposed steel girders.  Another example is: Beneath us I could see the flashing DON’T WALK signs at intersections, and the street lights running up and down the city in a perfect grid until downtown ended and the winding streets and cul-de-sacs of Orlando’s infinite suburb ended.  The imagery in this book makes you feel like you are there looking at the same thing.

The last reason is because of the dialogue.  John Green writes in the point of view of a teenager really well.  He adds so much emotion and meaning to the characters while only using dialogue.  What the characters say are also deep and inspirational.  For example:

“‘From here you can’t see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is, you see how fake it all is. It’s not even hard enough to be made out of plastic.  It’s a paper town..., look at all the houses that were built to fall apart, those streets that turn in on themselves.  All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm, and all of the paper kids...Everyone determined with the mania of owning things.  All the things paper-thin and paper-frail... I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.’” -Margo.  

As you can see, John Green makes the characters have emotion and meaning using only dialogue.  

Overall Paper Towns was an exciting and fun book because the characters were well-developed, the description had lots of imagery in it, and the dialogue was funny, deep, inspirational, and had lots of emotion content.  Paper Towns is a great coming of age contemporary book that I think everyone should enjoy.  So go pick up this book sit down and read.