Paper Towns by John Green

John Green is one of those authors. He has a following. His fans are. . . persistent. Just before The Fault In Our Stars was released as a movie, various of my students and friends started pestering me to read the book. They even gave me copies of it. I have five copies of the thing. Now, anyone who knows me, knows that insisting that I read or watch something too persistently tends to backfire. It's a weird perverse impulse, and I get stubborn about it.  However, I really try to read the books that my students recommend so I fought through it and read the book. It was good; it even made me cry.

So, now I'm gradually working through all of Green's books.

At its core Paper Towns is a mystery. It starts with the introduction of Quentin Jacobsen and the enigmatic Margo Roth Spiegelman. When they are 9, they stumble across the dead body of a suicide in a park. The two kids respond to this in very different ways.

Fast forward eight or nine years. Quentin and Margo are both seniors getting ready to graduate. They are not friends. In fact, they haven't really interacted since that fateful discovery in the park, but Quentin is still hopelessly in love with the idea of Margo. So, is anyone really surprised that when she shows up one night with a crazy plan  for a prank rampage that Quentin lets himself get sucked in. I'm not. Sounds like the beginning to a high school romance except that after that crazy night of pranks, Margo disappears.

No one knows where she is, but she left Quentin clues. He becomes obsessed with following those clues

A couple things about this. First, Green has actually made me want to read  Walt Whitman. I do not have fond memories of that man from American Lit, but a substantial section of Paper Towns revolves around "Song of Myself" from Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The sections described were interesting. It's possible that 20 years ago when I had to read it for class, I just wasn't ready for it. Second, for something calling itself YA, Paper Towns is terrifically philosophic.

In the search for Margo, Quentin spends a lot of time thinking about how he never really saw her as a person and that his obsession was with the idea of her. This ties directly into Whitman's "Song of Myself." It comes back again and again this idea of being perceptually trapped behind our own masks and limited in our ability to recognize the reality of others. Perfect idea for teens who are naturally struggling with identity but still. . .heavy stuff.