Book Review: Paper Towns by John Green

Title: Paper Towns

Author: John Green

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Pages: 305

Format: Paperback

Published: December, 2013

Price: Rp130.000 (Periplus)

Rating: 4½ / 5 stars

Date started: April 5, 2015 - Date finished: April 6, 2015

Synopsis:

Quentin has always loved Margo Roth Spiegelman, for Margo (and her adventures) are the stuff of legend at their high school. So when she one day climbs through his window and summons him on an all-night road trip of revenge he cannot help but follow.

But the next day Margo doesn’t come to school and a week later she is still missing. Q soon learns that there are clues in her disappearance . . . and they are for him. But as he gets deeper into the mystery – culminating in another awesome road trip across America – he becomes less sure of who and what he is looking for.

Masterfully written by John Green, this is a thoughtful, insightful and hilarious coming-of-age story.

Review:

Quentin Jacobsen has always had a crush on Margo Roth Spiegelman, his childhood friend and his next door neighbor. They were very close when they were little but kind of grew distant as they get older. Now, Margo is one of the cool kids at school, she's pretty, popular, and was the girlfriend of a jock. While Quentin is just a regular kid, with band geeks as friends.

One night, out of the blue Margo sneaked in through Q's window and said that she needed a his car to do her revenge scheme intended for her ex-boyfriend and some of her friends. This scheme would require the help of  Q. The scheme went on all night until dawn and because of that Q felt close again to Margo.

Few days later, Q had hoped that Margo will start being his friend again now that they've spent time together. But he was wrong, he went downstairs and found out that Margo ran away and since she had done it for quite a few times before her parents decided not to look for her. Whenever Margo ran away she always leaves breadcrumbs or clues to find her. The clues were usually for her parents but now Quentin seems to be the only one who can solve these clues and find Margo.

“It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.”

I just really need to take a second to breathe because let me tell you guys this book was so good! It was beyond any other John Green books I've read except The Fault in Our Stars because that book is perfection. Although Paper Towns was not as perfect as TFIOS it was still a great book nonetheless.

Okay, so in this book there are three parts with different chapters in it. I like to call these chapters as, the first one being before Margo was lost, the second being solving Margo's clues, and the third was the road-trip in finding Margo. And as you can tell obviously my favorite chapter was the third one, because it's a road trip chapter (enough said!).

In the end, you could not say that Margo Roth Spiegelman was fat, or that she was skinny, any more than you can say that the Eiffel Tower is or is not lonely. Margo's beauty was a kind of sealed vessel of perfection--uncracked and uncrackabele.

I really love how the mystery-solving and clues finding in this book was not like super hard but it wasn't easy either. Like at times the clues were confusing but it was solvable, and the answers were logically acceptable (well, at least for me it was). At some parts of the book I was confused and some parts I wasn't, some of my guesses were correct and some weren't. So I pretty much enjoyed immersing myself in this clues that Margo had supposedly left for Q.

As always I fell in love with John Green's writing, I like how he managed to not make Margo the center everything in this book. I love how even though Margo was missing, people didn't really leave their lives to constantly try to find her, they still can enjoy normal routines such as proms, parties, and graduation (well not for all of the characters).

In reading John Green's books you should always know that there's always a deep meaning hidden in his books. In Paper Towns, I felt that the meaning inside of this book was sometimes people are not how we see them, they can get uglier up close. This means that sometimes we like people because we imagine those people are nice, or friendly but when you really get to know them sometimes they're not who you think they are.

Because Margo knows the secret of leaving, the secret I have only just now learned: leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you.

Of course as always you shouldn't expect a happy ending when you're reading John Green's books because you'll never get it. When I got to that last page, that ending just destroyed me. I wanted a different ending but after I thought about it if the story had been a happy ending maybe I wouldn't like it as much as I did.

Overall, a great young adult contemporary book. I breezed through it during this long weekend. And of course another masterpiece by John Green. If you have read this book, share your thoughts by commenting down below! I would love to see your reaction to this book! :)

This post is intended for the 13 Days Reading Children and Young Adult's Literature.

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