Paper Towns Review

Hello everyone. It sure has been a while. And now that my summer has begun, I’ve decided I can pledge my time to improving my blog. Summer break is a synonym for “a crapload of free time that will be taken up with blogging and reading”.

So, to kick off this season, I’ll be giving my book review for Paper Towns by John Green in celebration for the movie coming out on July 24th. I had actually read this book three years ago, back when the only people who knew about John were Nerdfighters (followers of his YouTube channel in collaboration with his brother cleverly named “Vlogbrothers”). I had never heard of Nerdfighters, nor was I one until last year, but I did discover the book quite early on.

Paper Towns is a novel about a high school senior named Quentin Jacobsen, though his friends addressed him as “Q”, who had this prolonged crush on Margo Roth Spegielman. Margo was this wild, spontaneous mystery that Quentin had always been absorbed in. When the two were younger, they were friends, but they hadn't talked in years since. So one night, she came into his room and basically just brought him with her, as she plotted revenge towards her peers in a high-adrenaline, adventurous way. To keep the excitement of the novel and to allow the content to remain a mystery to those who haven’t read it yet, I will not discuss what they actually did.

Then the next day, she was just gone. And although she had done this many times before, this was new (leaving and then coming back a week later), it was clear that she wasn’t coming back this time. So Quentin along with his awesome band friends set out to find her.

The first time I read this novel, I was really confused. I feel like I could partially blame this on my lack of experience reading contemporary novels, as well as not having a mind fully developed for things I like to label “softer stuff”. That basically means any book that doesn’t have a wizard, fairy, dragon, or assassin in it.

Even with my confused and premature mind, I enjoyed the book. It was interesting and definitely felt like one of those “summer reads” every booktuber would eventually rave about. But it hadn’t “wowed” me just quite yet.

This spring/summer season, I had heard about the movie coming out soon. I had yet to watch the trailer to find out the amazing Natt Wolff would be playing Q, because I didn’t want the actor's’ presence to taint my reading experience. So I set out to read the novel before getting any movie information.

I don’t know if it was my maturity or just the feeling of rereading it, but I loved it. I felt like I could understand the humor and even the reason behind Q’s constant pining for a girl he didn’t really know anymore. To a lot of people, they see it as this tremendous love story. And I could see how the content may allude to that. But I feel like it’s more of a burst of reality. Of how the way we see someone and the way that they actually are could be so different and out of range, that we don’t really know the person we think we love.

After asking others their opinions on the book and why or why not they like it, those who claim they don’t say it’s because of the ending and how it isn’t the “cookie cutter” fairy tale ending they crave from a book.

Overall, I rate this book a 5 out of 5 stars, which is surely different from how I would have rated it about three years ago. If you liked or hated the book, feel free to comment that to me with any other discussion after thoughts you may have about the novel. Below, I will also have available the trailer in case you haven’t been able to see it and revel in its awesomeness.