Paper Towns by John Green

Title: Paper Towns
Author: John Green
Genre: Young Adult
Set in: United States
Source: Personal Shelf
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

My thoughts:
I cursed myself for waiting so long to read it and to discover John Green. I can safely say it’s one of the best YA novels I have read. I don’t know what I was expecting but I wasn’t expecting this. This book really make me laugh out loud many times, it made me fall in love with the characters.

Quintin (Q), Ben and Radar are friends who are in their final senior year. Q and his friends are not the popular kids , but they do have fun and are almost comfortable in their own skins which makes it a refreshing approach on unpopular kids in YA novels. Q is in love with this firecracker of a girl called Margo. She is everything Q is not. Although they were good friends when they were kids as they lived next to each other, they kind of drifted apart as they grew up. Margo became the popular girl. On the outside she seems perfect, but beneath that perfect exterior is a girl who is very different from what Q knows and loves. When she disappears leaving clues for Q to find her, he starts realizing that there is a lot more to her than what appears on the surface.

Q becomes obsessed with finding Margo and as the book progresses we get to know more about Q’s relationships with his friends and his parents. Paper Towns is the kind of book that makes you want to love the author for creating characters like these. The humor is delicious and as I said before I was laughing throughout. Even my husband was intrigued and asked me to keep my copy for him instead of taking it back home. What is the best part of Paper Towns is that even underneath all this humor is a sensitivity and warmth which very few authors can achieve.

If you haven’t read John Green, do so now. Even if you don’t read YA, you simply cannot go wrong with John Green. Cannot wait to read his other books.

Some Quotes from Paper Towns
“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”

“When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”

“The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.”

“When you say nasty things about people, you should never say the true ones, because you can’t really fully and honestly take those back, you know? I mean, there are highlights. And there are streaks. And then there are skunk stripes.”