Paper Towns

John Green did an excellent job creating characters and storyline in Paper Towns. The characters were certainly believable and elicited an emotional response from me as a reader. I was amused by Quentin and his friends, but my strongest response was to Margo. Green did an excellent job letting me know just enough about her. Frankly, I knew enough about her to dislike her. I thought that she was self-centered, selfish, and a bit of a user. So I didn't like her and found myself irritated with her in the same way I found myself irritated with Chris McCandless in Into the Wild. I will admit that I probably would have found both of them to be much more sympathetic characters if I had read the books as a teenager. I found Romeo terribly romantic when I read Romeo and Juliet in high school and I found him to be a rather whiny brat when I revisited the play as an adult. But in all cases, the characters were real enough to me to make me care about them. Caring isn't the same as liking. The characters are believable and real enough to create a response and that is what good writing is all about.

Green's method of revealing his characters through their speech and actions is so appealing because it is how we get to know the people who populate our lives. It was good to see the story through Quentin's eyes and to have him as the narrator because I found myself angry with Margo for hurting him and for using him. But I was proud of Q for realizing that his life would, indeed, never be hers. He was a character with whom I could strongly identify. One weakness in Green's characterization of Q was glaring, though. Quentin has been accepted to Duke University, but on p.114, Q narrate about Walt Whitman,"I'd never read him, but he looked like a good poet." Because he mentions reading The Great Gatsby, seems to know a bit of Shakespeare, etc., and he's headed for an extremely academically competitive university, I find it nearly impossible to believe that he hadn't read or studied Walt Whitman in high school.

The plot was interesting and kept my attention with its series of adventures, from Q's and Margo's finding the body as kids, to their evening adventure, to the ultimate adventure of Q's graduation day roadtrip with his friends. The road trip was the key to the story in that we saw who Q's friends really were. I loved the humor in the boys being stuck with nothing under their graduation robes. It was Green's humor that was my favorite part of the book.