"Paper Towns" John Green - Book Review

**Warning: If you haven't read this book proceed with caution.  I will probably spoil the ending.  There is no probably, I WILL spoil the ending.**

I started this book on Monday evening. Well in all fairness I started this book like 2 weeks ago, but thanks to my hectic schedule and work I didn't get to really get into it until Monday night.  I got about half way through and had to call it a night.  It was all I could think about the entire evening at work. But would he find Margo? And if he did would she be alive? Were the two biggest questions that plagued me. So naturally I couldn't go to bed Tuesday until these questions were answered. 

"Who is the real Margo? Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar.  So when she cracks open a window and climbs into his life - dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious compaign of revenge - he follows.  After their all-nighter ends, and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery.  But Q soon learns that there are clues - and they're for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he knew..."

Taking a step back and looking at the book as a whole, I loved it.   It touched on all the things young adults feel during that senior year, that moment you clean out your locker for the last time or the last time you eat lunch with your friends.  I found myself in love with the idea of the main characters, Q and Margo, falling love.  I couldn't help but thinking that John Greene had some how created a beautiful love story without the two characters even being together for a vast majority of the book.  Maybe it was the idea that Q had been so in love with Margo for all of his adolescence and now shes gone missing and he is the only one looking for her. He is the only one that wants to find her.  Its romantic really. 

Here is my biggest problem with this book:  None of the characters act like they are seniors.  

I mean...I suppose they act like seniors in high school but it was extremely difficult for me to picture Q as this 17 almost 18 year old man and Margo as an 18 year old woman. I consistently wanted to think of the characters as being sophomores maybe juniors  but then I would have to remind myself that sophomores don't drive...legally anyway. Sophomores don't go to prom and they don't throw end of the year parties. I'm also not used to reading a book from a man's point of view so this was a really interesting change. The only other author I've read who has written from the perspective of a man (not a little boy, Harry Potter doesn't count!) for either the entire book or large sections is Jodi Picoult. I'm not going to lie, I found it a little difficult to remember, while reading, that the book was narrated by a young man.  

I also strongly disliked the use of the term, "honneybunnies". I also was not fond of the character Ben who used this term. Every time I had to read it, I cringed a little and felt a little awkward. "Honneybunnies" refers to pretty much any girl that Ben deems attractive...which is pretty much anything with legs. Ben is probably the exact replica of a horny teenage boy, but seeing as I am neither a teenager or a boy, I can't be sure. But just about every chance Ben had, he mentioned sex, honneybunnies, or his genitals. To an almost obnoxious level. I also found his lack of loyalty annoying. Ben is supposed to have been Q's best friend for pretty much his entire life or at least since grade school.  So then why is it that Ben never wants to help Q find Margo?  Why is it that Ben all but rolls his eyes about the search for her?  Why is it that the moment Ben gets a chance to be a part of the "cool" kids and he gets to go to prom with the almost prom queen, does he jump at it?  I can't for the life of me understand why this hidden topic is pretty much brushed off and seems that all is forgiven when Ben chooses to miss graduation to go on a 21 hour car ride to find Margo.  

It is hard for me to explain the book and why I love it.  I love it because its based right here in Orlando though most of the areas used are fictional  and I love it because underneath it all its a love story.  At its core you have a boy who has been love with the popular girl for his entire youth and one night, his dream girl sneaks into his bedroom and leads him on this crazy journey.  You have a girl who on the outside has it all but behind the mask she has built she is someone else completely.  Said girl is smothered by the fakeness of it all and fears that if she stays even a moment longer she will suffocate.  As you turn the pages you get to watch as everything the boy knew about the girl is stripped away and he slowly falls in love with the beautifully broken girl that is left.  The book talks about how we are all paper-people living paper thin lives, and we put on these layers to appease those around us.  Sometimes we make it and sometimes all the strings inside get twisted and broken.  

Favorite Quotes 

"Interesting capitalization," I said.
"Yeah.  I'm a big believer in random capitalization.  The rules of capitalization are so unfair to the words in the middle"

"Light, the visible reminder of Invisible Light."

"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 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 cul-de-sacs, 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."

"Standing before this building, I learn something about fear.  I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible.  It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington's house.  This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises.  This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed.  This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead."

"Ahab's a madman railing against fate.  You never see Ahab wanting anything else in this whole novel, do you?  He has a singular obsession.  And because he is the captain of his hip, no one can stop him.  You can argue that Ahab is a fool for being obsessed.  But you could also argue that there is something tragically heroic about fighting this battle he is doomed to lose.  Is Ahab's hope a kind of insanity or is it the very definition of humanness?"

"He has all kinds of problems - just like anyone.  I know it's impossible for you to see peers this way, but when you're older, you start to see them - the bad kids and the good kids and all kids - as people.  Thy're just people, who deserve to be cared for.  Varying degrees of sick, varying degrees of neurotic, varying degrees of self-actualized."

"The longer I do my job,' he said, 'the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors.  It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel."

"But isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are?  We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals."

"Consciousness makes for poor windows."

"It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined."