Review of Paper Towns by John Green

John Green definitely has a way with words. I think his real strength is in the cleverness of his dialogue, and some really well-crafted individual sentences: "The longest night of my life began tardily." I loved his first book, Looking for Alaska, and liked An Abundance of Katherines, but the theme of the earnest but boring boy trying to understand the quirky but troubled woman (women) in his life has worn a little thin for me.The Prologue is beautifully done --the back story of Q and Margo finding a dead body in the park when they were nine is a great set-up to the rest of the book. The night they discovered the body, Margo showed up at Q's bedroom window after he went to bed. As the current story gets going, "Margo Roth Spiegelman slid open my screenless bedroom window for the first time since telling me to close it nine years before.” This begins what I think of as "The Night of Mayhem" where Margo wreaks revenge on her enemies and former friends using: 1 whole catfish, Veet, Vaseline, Mountain Dew, one dozen tulips, one bottle of water, tissues, one can of blue spray paint, The Club (car steering wheel lock), and an air horn. The next day Margo has gone missing. The middle part of the book is actually my favorite. Q tries to solve the mystery of Margo's disappearance (which involves a deep analysis of the Whitman poem The Leaves of Grass), keep his own life going, and convince his friends that they should help him search for Margo. There are some great characters: Q's friends Radar, who spends inordinate amounts of time correcting entries in Omnictionary, a Wikipedia-like online resource, and whose parents own the world's largest collection of black Santas; the bully Chuck Parsons, who "did not participate in organized sports, because to do so would distract from the larger goal of his life: to one day be convicted of homicide." The road trip to rescue Margo is actually my least favorite part of the book, but I know that opinion is not shared by many readers. One final thing I like about this book. It's the first time I’ve read a book that included hanging around the band room, which, being a band geek, is what I spent most of my high school career doing. It was a great place to hide out from the rest of the school (kids and teachers) and it had it’s own parking lot which wasn’t guarded like the main parking lot, making it convenient for sneaking out to McDonald’s for lunch. Review by Stacy