Paper Towns by John Green (MOBI)

Description

Winner of the Edgar AwardThe #1 New York Times BestsellerPublishers Weekly and USA Today BestsellerMillions of Copies SoldQuentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificent Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life—summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge—he follows. When their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Margo has disappeared. But Q soon learns that there are clues—and they’re for him. Embarking on an exhilarating adventure to find her, the closer Q gets, the less he sees the girl he thought he knew.#1 Bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars John Green crafts a brilliantly funny and moving coming-of-age journey about true friendship and true love.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Of the John Green books I have read, this is my favorite. We have a familiar cast of characters — the nerdy teenage boy and his brainiac friends and the damaged teenage girl who is may be popular and confident on the outside but is deeply troubled on the inside. We also have a lot of smart dialogue, a mystery, a quest and the anguish and sweetness of young love. But in this book, it somehow comes together, aided by the musings of Walt Whitman, is a way that is not treacly or weepy – but real and grounded.The book is dominated by Margo, a high school queen bee whose brash exterior hides an intellectual and angst-filled interior. The male lead is Quentin, brainy but balanced. The two live next door but are in different social sects in the high school caste system. However Quentin carries a torch for his childhood friend. After an extraordinary night of adventure together a month before graduation, Margo disappears leaving some cryptic clues as to her whereabouts. It is for Quentin to follow the trail — but to find Margo he first has to understand Margo, not as an ideal or love object or symbol — but the real person.The climactic scenes of this quest are extraordinarily well done and the final resolution is moving without being shattering. Really enjoyed this one.

⭐Well-defined characters are hard enough to do. Well-defined characters who will come across differently to everyone are much harder to write. Yet it is this kind of character that John Green nails in his YA mystery novel, Paper Towns.To be clear, I am not a John Green groupie. While I enjoy his Youtube channel and went to go see The Fault in Our Stars shortly after reading it, I do not enjoy everything John Green writes. To be completely honest, The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns were the only things he has written that I actually like. So when I say Paper Towns is a truly unique book, I’m not just saying that because John Green wrote it.The book follows Q, a nerdy highschool senior who dreams of even talking to his next-door neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman, his wild-child opposite who he has been crushing on since he was a kid. After a crazy night where she ropes him into a crazy revenge scheme, she disappears, leaving clues for Quentin to find.First off, Green makes it clear that this is no love story. Thank goodness. This is a story about two people, one of which has a major attraction to the other. This is a story whose theme is that sometimes, we build other people up into things they aren’t, and that we shouldn;t get disappointed when they don’t live up to the standards we made for them in our head.While Q was well-written and layered as a character, Margo was the character that the book was centered on, and will come off differently to different people. Some people may empathize with her need to get away. Others might understand what it is like to feel like you have the whole world figured out. Personally, I hated her. She was interesting, but I hated her. Why? Because she reminds me of actual people that I have met..and heavily disliked. She left clues, yet got mad when people dared follow her. She had this idea in her head that everywhere outside of the Orlando suburbs would be a magical places where no one had ideas of being normal and settling down with, and this is the kicker here, a job and a family. How dare they. Horrible, paper people. All of them normies.Margo seemed to think that anyone who colored within the lines was pretty much a horrible person. That’s what bugged me. She let people in, letting them think she was friends with them, while secretly despising them because she believed that they were forcing her to make false personalities for each person. The fact I’m getting so angry writing about it proves how good this book is. I don’t identify at all with Margo, yet something about the way she is written strikes an angry chord in me because I have known, and been hurt by people like her. Even if you don’t relate to the characters in this book, you still get something out of it, and that quality is what makes a good book a great book.The rest of the book focused on the development of Q, the mystery of where Margo vanished to, and the roadtrip. The weakness of the book was the mystery location of Margo-Green seemed to be more interested in his characters and where they were going-and it shows. I’m not sure if this was intentional or not, but Margo’s location was the least interesting part of the book for me. I just didn’t care.On the other side, the roadtrip was fantastic. It was one of the most fun things I have ever read in a realistic fiction book. It was fun, sped up the momentum of the storyline, yet still carried the themes that had been apparent throughout the book. To be concise, the tonal shift from Q moping about Margo and the amigos going on a roadtrip wasn’t jarring, but uplifting. It felt natural. The confederate flag/black santa gag genuinely made me laugh, as did the bit with Ben insisting that he didn’t care about anyone else, just himself as he saved everyone from the cow fence..thing. Wreck. Whatever. Point is, it was great.Overall, Paper Towns is a well-written coming of age novel. Tightly written with natural dialogue and peppered with nerdy antics that I can personally assure you actual nerds talk about, Paper Town’s main mystery isn’t Margo’s location, but ended up being the mystery of the real people behind the perceptions that we give each other.

⭐There are three main reasons why you should read John Green’s books.1. If you have a teenager there’s a fair chance they will stumble across one of his books, be instantly hooked and spend hours telling you about characters and plots and then move on to telling you about Nerdfighters, and Project for Awesome and Crash Course and the Vlog Brothers and it would be great if you had some idea what on earth they’re talking about;2. If you have a teenager who hasn’t read any books by John Green you should buy them, read them and pass them on and instantly derive serious credibility points; and3. They’re great.I’ve written before about The Fault in Our Stars; perhaps the most well known of John Green’s books, and soon to be a movie. I loved it, a lot. In light of my enthusiasm for TFIOS and point number 1 above, over the past couple of weeks I’ve also read Paper Towns and Looking for Alaska.First up let me deal with my one minor criticism of these two books. Both follow a similar theme – nerdy teenage boy is in love with unattainable girl who is wild and rebellious and opens up a whole new world to him. I’m gratuitously simplifying the plots here, but that’s the basic set-up. If I hadn’t read the two of them back-to-back it honestly wouldn’t really have mattered. But as it was I felt like there was a bit of plot overlap and I really wished I’d read them further apart.Now to the good stuff.These are funny books. They are also sad books, but the sad is well balanced with the funny.”My mother worked with crazy teenagers in juvenile detention centers and prisons. I think that’s why she never really worried about me – as long as I wasn’t ritually decapitating gerbils or urinating on my own face, she figured I was a success.” – Paper TownsI laughed a lot through Paper Towns – particularly during the road trip part. If John Green and his brother Hank didn’t try out elements of the road trip personally, I will be very surprised.One of the things I admire most about John Green is that he doesn’t shy away from issues, whether love, death, sex, being smart, being afraid, feeling guilty or in pain. He doesn’t speak down to his audience, rather he writes in a raw and honest way that makes you understand why he has such a huge following. Both books explore complicated issues without glossing over the details or tangled emotions of those involved.The other thing I love is that he has a passion for learning and knowledge that flows through his book in an intelligent and understated way. If I told you that a reasonable chunk of Looking for Alaska revolves around a discussion of how a philosophical understanding of the tenets of Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism can help to make sense of life and death and one’s place in the world, well, let’s just say I wouldn’t tell you that because it would make it sound like a book that it isn’t. But somehow he manages to take topics like that and weave them into the story in a way that makes you stop and think and, more importantly, want to read more.These are books that start with the basic assumption that teenagers think, and think about serious issues. And they assume that with a bit of a prod, those issues can be considered in the context of religion, or Walt Whitman or Thoreau or any number of intelligent contexts, without scaring readers away.So, in light of all of that, now you need to:Buy the books.Read them.Give them to your kids.Then talk about them with aforementioned kids.Authors like John Green make the world a better place. They remind you that the world is complicated and raw, and funny, and sad, and full of incredible, beautiful people. And most importantly that there’s a place for you in it.

⭐Genre(s): Romance, Mystery, Young AdultFavourite Quote: “I don’t know how I look, but I know how I feel. Young. Goofy. Infinite.”***Please note that this review will likely contain spoilers and only reflects my own thoughts and experiences. There is no conflict of interest here.***I’m about eleven years too late to this party but I’ve heard that this is a must read more times than I be bothered to count, so here we are!I’m no stranger to John Green, having used to watch the VLOG Brothers series on YouTube many eons ago. I’ve read three of his other titles: Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines and The Fault in Our Stars. The latter probably the most well known after the film which was popular with the teens.A lot of Green’s book tend to take a similar form, in my opinion, so I go into Paper Towns with the wondering if I will have the same experience or if it will be something fantastically different?Let’s break this down shall we?StoryWe start with a death, or the aftermath of a suicide to be more descriptive. We meet our two young, main characters who unwillingly meet said Mr. Recently Deceased and come to terms with the idea of the finality of death.Quick scene change to present day and we live on the shoulder of Quentin; our male protagonist as he’s drafted into Margo Roth Speigelman’s antics (you will despise this name eventually).We learn that Quentin and Margo haven’t actually really spoken much since their duo suicide find as children and for some reason, Margo then chooses this time to pay real attention to Quentin.After their night filled of semi-illegal activities designed to punish anyone and everyone who ever got under her skin, Margo then disappears after this night.The whole story is then revolved around trying to find her by deciphering obnoxiously ridiculous ‘clues’ apparently left behind. They follow a clue. They failed to find her. They follow another clue. And another. And another. Fail, rinse and repeat.Again and again.I didn’t really care if they found Margo or not. The most exciting part of the story for me, was the character development between Quentin, his friends and the ‘popular’ crowd.SettingSet in Orlando. Mostly Quentin’s house and a weird abandoned mall that Margo happened to live in for a bit.Aside from this, we didn’t really see a lot more on of typical daily life – however I did enjoy the road trip and really felt like cheering when they left the mundane confines of this town I personally don’t know anything about.The paper towns references did take a bit of time to get my head around, but I kind of got it in the end-ish.CharactersMy main issue with all Green’s books that I’ve read, is that the characters are all very same-y. You’ve got the main protagonist, who’s usually a male nerdy figure with some sort of special quirk about him and very smart. Then you’ve got the female interest who’s always the out and out ballsy girl of his dreams who’s the total polar opposite and has the moral structure of beating to her own drums. Lastly, you’ve always got one or two comic relief characters who are the support system, but still throw out one liners and some sort of remark about ‘man I need a girl’.There’s always a character in one of Green’s books that seems to have a serious case of verbal diorrhoea. In which case, it’s Margo Roth bloody Spiegelman. That on more than a few occasions, I just wanted her to give me a few minutes of peace to digest the situation.The main flaw for me that I couldn’t get past is that Margo really manipulates Quentin’s love for her. She’s not an idiot. She knows that he will do literally anything for her. So when she appears on his windowsill one night with her ultimate plan, despite having not had a real conversation with him for years, she knows Quentin is the only one who will admire and support her edgy need for having the last word.Equally annoyingly, Quentin holds her in too high of a regard for what she deserves. Margo does not want to be found, she wants people to be in love with the memory of her. When the group manage to track her down eventually and she responds with rude comments to be met with their disappointment at her greeting, I felt like this was the realest point in the story. But no, this quickly changes again to the Margo show. The Margo is so bloody amazing show.My respect for Quentin just disappears really and I find myself wanting to shake him silly and tell him that this romantic idea of his friend, is only an ideal, not the reality.LanguageTypical John Green conversation that involves teenagers/young adults speaking about topics and theoretical philosophy way above their heads for the age group. A little unrealistic.ThemeI don’t want to refer to this as a romance because it’s Quentin being unwillingly manipulated into thinking Margo is a God or an angel in fleshy form. OK. Maybe not as dramatic, but it very well may be.I would class this as a young adult/coming of age tale.PROS+ Quentin’s parents are surprisingly decent+ Two words: black santas+ Radar was the least annoying secondary characterCONS+ Although very intelligent, Quentin is a love sick idiot for following on this crazy chicken chase. Honestly, he deserved better+ Margo Roth Speigelman is a terribly dull character and totally in love with herself. This makes for such a meaningless and annoying ending+ The string of clues were really out of the box and just ridiculous for both a teenager to create and others to even begin to follow!+ The repetitive nature of here’s a clue, here’s a location, no Margo, next clue. And so on.+ The paper towns was a nice gimmick, but I think fed into the overall story a little weirdlyConclusionPerhaps I’m just not someone who enjoys John Green books, which is a shame because I genuinely like him as a person.The repetition of the overall theme of this book in line with his other titles are as follows: totally unattainable girl. Nerdy main character. Comic relief nerdy friend and some kind of coming of age romance.I really didn’t enjoy reading this and it was honestly a slog for me to get to the end. Although this just wasn’t the story for me, I acknowledge that it still remains a fairly popular book and film for some others.Overall I award Paper Towns:2 out of 5 magical unicorns

⭐Review: I think this may be my favourite John Green novel and I am regretting leaving this until so late to read. Sweeping statement I know but I so enjoyed this novel. I felt that the characters were so well developed, I felt a real affinity with them and I can wait to some how they come across on the big screen when I se the film. The storyline of this novel was also seriously gripping,in found myself turning and turning this pages and read it in just two sittings. There is a certain element of mystery about it in some parts but this is most definitely a coming of age novel and something that you will feel yourself as you read John Green’s beautiful words!I like the fact that this novel was written from Q’s point of view because I really could identify with Q as a character. Yes, I did find myself judging him for his kind of obsessive nature when it came to Margo and the parallel’s between his search for Margo and the novel Moby Dick that he is reading in class are really quite accurate but I respected the fact that a he had always been a good student and wanted to remain that way but he was torn between staying that ‘ideal student’ and following his heart/his friends. I thought the characters of Ben and Radar were seriously funny and I really enjoyed reading about them as much as I did Q! Margo, on the other hand, I wasn’t so taken with. I felt she was a little attention seeking almost at the same time as she was trying not to be attention seeking but I thought her character worked really well as the yang to Q’s ying!I really liked the fact that this novel was set in Orlando becaus I could picture some of the areas they were talking about and visiting and there have been so many movies that are set in ‘upstate New York’ that I could picture there too so I really liked the setting of this book. And of course, being written by John Green, there is some beautiful description, no matter where the setting or what the situation the character are in. As far as young adult books go, this can be enjoyed on so many levels that I am sure, no matter what the audience, any reader will be able to get something from this young or more mature. It is definitely a coming of age novel, it is funny and there are some seriously good life observations contained with tin it’s pages. I so enjoyed this reading experience and now I can’t wait to see the film and see it do justice to this great novel.

⭐I am in a complete John Green bubble at the moment after the release of The Fault in Our Stars trailer all I want to do is watch his vlogs and read his books and cry over them. I was a bit apprehensive about Paper Towns at first because The Fault in Our Stars was so incredibly emotional I didn’t want to be let down by his other books not moving me as much as that one did. But then I figured there’s no point comparing his books to each other because they’re all different and although Paper Towns isn’t sad, it still demonstrates John Green’s outstanding abilities to capture and connect with the thoughts of his young readers. He is a literary genius and can open up the minds of young adults (and older adults alike) into the most bizarre and beautiful of worlds and gets you thinking and contemplating things you’d never even thought of before. Paper Towns is about a boy called Quentin, Q for short, who is in love with his classmate and neighbour, Margo. She turns up at his window one night and takes him on a all-night road trip where she gets revenge on her classmates. The next day she doesn’t turn up for school but with a history of running away out of the blue this seems fairly normal. Until Q starts finding clues she’s left for him and sets out to try and find her. After being led into abandoned buildings and down dead ends, he finally gets one solid lead on where she might be so along with 3 friends they embark on a 2 day road-trip where they find out a lot about themselves and each other but the main question is, will they find Margo?I loved the storyline and the normality of it all at first. Just a boy who’s in love with a girl, a couple of goofy best friends and the general banter boys that age have but then John leads us down a completely different path of both normal and abnormal. The book was structured in 3 parts; Part 1: The Strings. Which occurred before Margo went missing. This is the chapter where she takes Q on the all-night road trip and where you learn a lot about Margo. Part 2: The Grass. This is where she’s gone missing and when Q and his friends have found the clues she left. The final part is called The Vessel and this section is set out in hours e.g. hour 1, hour 2 and this is the final part of their journey. It was an unusual set-up but I loved it and each section focuses on a different theme and you see Q change throughout. Q was a great main character. He was dorky and sweet and the kind of boy you’d want to be friends with. I found myself picturing Logan Lerman in my head as Q because I felt he had some of the same traits as Charlie from The Perks of Being a Wallflower but he was a lot more sociable and confident. Margo was such a dominant character but she wasn’t even physically present in about 75% of the book. I loved that even though she wasn’t there, the whole story and everything in it revolved around her.John Green really gets it down to a T, the way in which some young people think and talk, their dreams and desires and the way they see the world. John’s work has been criticised for the way in which the young characters in his books think isn’t realistic and they don’t actually think these things but they do, because I do and although not all young people may feel the same and may not think the same I completely understand Q’s thought process, John’s narrative and Margo’s need and desire to run away. I absolutely loved the whole, ‘paper towns’ idea but when you really think about it, it’s absolutely right. It definitely varies throughout the book but the literal meaning of a paper town is when mapmakers will insert fake places (called paper towns) onto their maps to make sure no one is copying their maps but it’s the thought of creating something that other people want to make real, which resembles Margo and Qs perception of Margo in the book. This book very much relies on hidden meanings but when you get to the bottom of those meanings, it’s beautiful. I always find it so difficult to review John Green’s books and worry that I’m not doing them the justice they deserve but this book was outstanding. I truly could not put it down and the whole idea, the characters, the story was perfect in every way possible. It was full of memorable and relatable quotes and John really makes you look at things completely differently. He is slowly becoming one of my upmost favourite authors and I could read and live in the stories he creates forever.Find all my reviews here:[…]

⭐This is the first novel by John Green that I’ve read (I know, I’m a little behind the trend but oh well) and I am definitely planning on reading some more of his work.I was initially attracted to the beautiful cover art of this novel. I’m a sucker for a good cover and this one really caught my eye. Plus, I fancied an indulgent Young Adult novel, something that would suck me in and keep me absorbed. This was exactly what I wanted.Quentin “Q” Jacobsen is mere weeks away from graduating High School. He’s got a place at a decent College lined up and his life seems to be on-track, well as much as it can be when you’re eighteen years old and trying desperately to avoid the horrors of your High School Prom. And then one night, the mysterious and beautiful Margo Roth Spiegelman, the next door neighbour he’s loved since he was a child, waltzes in through his bedroom window and whisks him off on a tour of the neighbourhood to complete a series of pranks she has lined up for her cheating boyfriend and his entourage.And then, just like that, Margo is gone. She doesn’t turn up for school the next day or the day after that. There is no note, no phone call, no explanation whatsoever. Margo has simply vanished, leaving a trail of mystery behind her. Knowing that on previous escapes from her suburban life, Margo has left clues as to her whereabouts (the letters M, S, P, and I left uneaten in a bowl of Alphabet Soup), Q and his friends begin a search of Margo’s life for any possible clues.But when it comes down to it, did Margo really want to be found? Did she really expect Q to find her? And just who is Margo anyway? As he creeps around her life, following the paper trail that Margo has left for him, Q begins to doubt that he ever knew the real Margo, the Margo she is inside her heart. And as he gets closer to finding her, he must reconcile the two version of Margo Roth Spiegelman and what they mean to him.This was a beautiful, deep read. Once again, and I know it’s a theme with the Young Adult titles I’m reading lately, I really wish this novel had been around when I was a teenager myself. The characters are exquisite, especially Margo, who is secretly the girl I wanted to be at eighteen and failed. And the idea of paper towns is cleverly worked into the plot and imbued with such subtle meaning (I don’t want to go into detail on what paper towns are because it’s a crucial plot point and I hate spoilers!). I adored this book and want to re-read it, want to see if there are any little details I missed, or cleverly inserted foreshadowing that would be identified only on a second read.If you like a cute little mystery and 3D characters that will stay in your mind, then check this out. You won’t be disappointed.

⭐I debated for a while whether to give this book 4 stars or 5 before finally settling on 4 and a half. I loved this book and most of the characters, unfortunately Margo Roth Spiegelman is the reason this book loses half a star. While I can understand the desperate need to find a missing person and I can see the fascination towards someone as mysterious as Margo, I just don’t get why Q is so obsessed with Margo. She is everything her parents claim she is: spoiled, obnoxious, uncaring of anyone but herself and unhappy unless she knows people are talking about her. Margo goes on and on about Orlando being a paper town full of shallow people, but she is one of them! Her only redeemable quality is that she actually admits it. She doesn’t give anyone a chance to get to know the real her, as Q discovers on his journey.The writing and the rest of the characters, however, completely make up for my hatred of Margo Roth Spiegelman. Full of the brilliant, easy-to-read prose that made me fall in love with The Fault In Our Stars, John Green has once again written a book that people everywhere can relate to and enjoy.

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