Now, don't get me wrong, I did enjoy the book. It wasn't a terrible way for me to spend the day, but I didn't love it. To me, honestly, it seemed too much like Looking for Alaska. There is a boy, and a girl, the boy is a nerd/geek, but in his own right, and the girl is this person that he has somehow idolized and then fantasized into a being that is so unrealistic that his realization of how wrong he could be could only become part of the plot. He even comes to this conclusion:
So, here is the information on it. The book's main characters are Quentin, who is referred to as Q for the majority of the novel, and Margo Roth Spiegelman, who disappears for the majority of the novel.
Q is your average teenager. Not in the over-stereotypical, media sensationalized sense. He does not party hard, does not sleep around, none of those things. He goes to school, hangs out with his friends, and likes a girl. He is nerd in the sense of not being popular, but is perfectly fine with is lot in life. Except for one thing. He has a...fixation...on Margo. Margo and Q were childhood friends since they grew up living next to each other. Even from childhood he had a fascination with her, and it never faded as they grew into their teens even though they grew apart. He always observed her from a far, but never tried to make things happy.
The concept of Margo is hard to put into words because we never really get to see her from a point of view other than Q's. Even when her friends are talking about her, he still filters it and refutes what he doesn't like, but then again, begins to accept and evolve his concept about her. So, yeah, hard to pin down, but that is supposed to be the nature of her character.
The story begins by sharing a memory from their childhood that would cement Margo in Q's mind as the girl he will always want. This draws the reader in immediately. The, Margo and Q team up for a good number of pages and we are drawn into this realistic night of their lives. If you didn't know they hadn't been hanging out, you would think them two very good friends. Then Margo disappears.
This is the part of the book I found to be lacking. It starts with her disappearance being nothing out of the ordinary. No one is surprised and everyone thinks that she will be home soon, especially since she has done this kind of whimsical thing before. When she is gone longer, it becomes Q's obsession to find her. For good reason, as he does fear the worse. But, when I say obsession, I mean obsession. It got old to read about his dead ends and failed attempts to decipher the clues left for him, and that is where I started to wane on how much I would enjoy this book.
I fear to talk to much more about it for sake of giving out spoilers. But, as I said earlier, I didn't hate this. In fact, I did love the way he incorporated the clues. I really liked that. To me it speaks to the point where we all want to think we matter enough that if we leave hints people will follow them. We all want to believe that our absences go noticed, and that in some sense day to day life is not the same if we are not there. I, as always, also love the way that Green writes his characters. None of them seem far fetched, and it wasn't hard to relate to anyone of them. Even to me, someone who has always known exactly what she wants to do and exactly how to go about doing it, could relate to Margo and her ideas of paper towns and paper people.
The story in the novel itself is good. The characters are developed well, or not - but that is for plot purposes, and everything seems very realistic. I just didn't get into this as much because I kept seeing too many similarities between this and Looking for Alaska.
You walk away from this novel with some thought provoking quotes and it does make you wonder about the relationships we value in life, but I didn't dwell on these thoughts long and hard. So, was it good? Yes. Was it great? No. I would recommend it to anyone I know hasn't read Looking for Alaska, and would want to pick their non-predisposed brains on it.
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