Paper Towns

I've been looking forward to reading John Green's new novel Paper Towns for over a year. Green's book hit stores today, but I actually snagged a copy a week ago when a local bookstore mistakenly (albeit wonderfully) put the book on display early. I may or may not have done a massive double-take and let out a weird guttural noise when I saw said book, which may or may not have incited a dirty stare from an elderly woman reading what I can only assume to be a highly interesting Rachel Ray cookbook.

The reason I was so excited to read Paper Towns is that I absolutely adore Green's previous two novels, Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines. During a time when young adult bestsellers usually consist of say, bitchy cliquey schoolgirls or a poorly written saga about dazzling vampires in suburbia, Green's work provides a much needed breath of fresh air. His books are honest and genuine. His characters have emotional depth. He intelligently weaves wit and humor within an arc of big emotional ideas, like hope and empathy. Plus, the books are written from the perspective of teen boys, a segment that is weirdly underrepresented in YA lit.

What is Paper Towns about, you ask? Because I am unfathomably lazy, I'm going to let the fine person who wrote the description on the book jacket tell you:

"Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back in to his life--dressed as a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge--he follows.

After their all-nighter ends a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, as 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."

While this is an apt description, I think it's a difficult book to summarize. But I mean that as a sincere compliment. Paper Towns isn't one easily marketable idea, rather is so many things: mystery, coming-of-age, how we see others and misimagine them, Walt Whitman and human connectedness, road trips, friendships, urban exploration, sustainability and quite memorably, the world's largest collection of black Santas.

I had really high expectations before reading this book, and I've got to say, they were met. Paper Towns is a remarkable book. It's smart and laugh-out-loud hilarious and contains sad hope, my favorite kind of hope. The big ideas in the book transcend the story, and really work on a much higher, universal level.

So yeah, coming from someone who reads a shit-ton of books, this one really stands out and I highly recommend it.

BUY IT

P.S. Just in case you're confused, there are two covers for Paper Towns, as evidenced in the photos above (see Sad Margo and Happy Margo). Two covers, one book.