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 into his life - dressed like a ninja and
summoning him for an ingenious campaign 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 Q gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he
knew.
I have never read a John Green novel, something I needed to
correct. My choice was between The Fault In Our Stars and Paper Towns. As Nat
cautioned me that the former would have me crying buckets, I thought starting
off with Paper Towns would be a good way to go.
John Green has a fantastic sense of sarcasm and humor - have you seen his vlog? These highschoolers on the verge of graduation are very much normal and ridiculous. Quentin is just a great guy. In fact, the
entire time I was reading it, I thought to myself how much Nat would love him
because he’s just one of those good guys, a forever boy. His relationship with Margo is an interesting
one. As kids, they discovered the dead
body of a man under a tree at a park. Quentin pinpoints that moment as the
moment that their friendship changed and she became more withdrawn.
When she encourages him to join her on her revenge
campaign against her cheating boyfriend and her lying best friend, Quentin feels it’s finally
his chance to get close to her again before they graduate. (It doesn't mean that he's not nervous about what they'll get up to.) It’s almost as if the old
Margo is back. Throughout the night he senses something is up with her. After an interesting night of activities they go their separate ways. Quentin thinks that now things will be different between them at school. But then she doesn’t show up to school the next day nor the days after. Turns out she has
a history of running away and leaving clues behind. Her parents have
given up on finding her and have decided to no longer play her games. Quentin though can’t let it go. He discovers that Margo did indeed leave him some
clues and he and his friends decide to try and find her themselves. As all this
is happening, Quentin can only wonder to himself who Margo has become, why she
is doing this and why he’s obsessed with finding her.
I liked that Paper Towns aside from being about friendship
and growing pains was also a neat little mystery. With every clue that Quentin
came across, which includes the Walt Whitman poem "Song of Myself", I was trying to figure them out too. There were moments where I
was worried about what he’d run into. And
while Margo is missing, life goes on as usual with their friends getting ready
for prom and graduation. Quentin’s best friends are concerned about him being too caught up
in the Margo mystery instead of enjoying the final few days of school with everyone. I was bothered by Margo
herself because I ended up feeling so protective of Quentin. I was annoyed by her mysterious motives for dragging him into her
drama without giving him any kind of explanation. The poor guy goes through hell worrying about her. He has no clue what is going on inside her head and yet he's still big-hearted
enough to want to find her and help her. Those good guys just get put through the ringer!
I will say that Paper Towns does have a satisfying ending for everyone in the sense that it works for each of the characters. It is about the nature of friendship and how it changes. What do you hold on to and what do you let go of? This is what Quentin has to come to terms with eventually.
~ Bel
