Sunday, June 2, 2013 | By: Unknown

The Strings, the Grass, or the Vessel: Paper Towns

                Despite the end-of-year hassles of getting ready for exams and doing last-minute graduation prep, I’ve decided that it was about time to sit down with a good book and just read. And with my roots in Nerdfighteria (see “People Who Love People Who Love Blogging”) and my incomplete John Green reading list, I decided that Paper Towns would be a good choice. And boy was I right…

                Paper Towns follows the adventure of a Quentin “Q” Jacobsen as he searches for Margo Roth Spiegelman, the girl next door who was always too distant to acquire. But one night in the last month of their senior year, Q is visited by Margo in the dead of night and taken on a journey of revenge. After the all-nighter ends, Margo is gone, absent from school, from her home, and from the small community of their native Orlando, Florida. Shortly after her departure the clues begin to appear. Small and seemingly insignificant, it is up to Q and his small band of merry misfits to track down the exact location of Margo Roth Spiegelman. Through the journey led by the clues, Q makes discoveries about himself and the infinite perceptions made about oneself by others.


                I was so into this book from the get-go. Green has this way of describing events within the book on the reader’s level (assuming that they have the mentality and reading ability of a young adult), which quickly makes the reader comfortable with the contents of the book. It wasn’t like the book was preaching about anything; the voice created as the narrator was honest and believable, which is what makes any halfway decent book readable in my opinion. Such detail within the book existed to the point where I was right there solving the mystery along with Q and his friends. It was a fantastic journey with the right mixture of suspense and hidden secret; the mystery wasn’t too far-fetched, not too hard to solve as a reader, and not too easy either. Future readers of this will acknowledge the fact that the main protagonist and his closest friends are male high school seniors and thus tend to joke endlessly in perversion. It was almost too much so for my taste, but once you make your decision to accept it as part of life or simply choose to ignore it except in comic cases, the book becomes much less tainted, though nothing graphic actually does happen. On a scale of ten I would give this book a score of 9, hindered from achieving a ten based mostly on the amount of tainted language expressed throughout the book.

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