Paper Towns by John Green

[lightreads]

Paper Towns by John Green

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Aggressively charming high school boy shenanigans. It did charm me; these kids are far cleverer, funnier, and sweeter than I recall from that age, but that helps, not hinders. This is a quest book -- the girl has vanished, and the boy has to unpick the clues she left and find her. The best thing about this book is the ways it calls this book on its crap: the point here is that the girl is a cipher to the boy, a blank girl cut-out doll. And how that happens because we have a hard time seeing each other as people, a hard time recognizing that someone is as human as we are. I was going to say 'especially at that age,' but, well. So this book is about how the way we see other people is really about us and not about them, and I liked that.

I understand that Green's other books are also basically the same boy questing after girl story, and I suspect the ones that aren't like this one, thematically, are not going to work nearly so well for me. We'll see.




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