I had to write this review for my young adult lit class, I just thought I'd post it here, too.
Paper Towns
Paper Towns is a novel by John Green, who has also written the young adult novels An Abundance of Katherines and Looking for Alaska. Paper Towns is his third novel, published in 2008. In this novel, we follow the life of our narrator, Quinby Jacobsen (known as Q) and his exploits as a senior in high school. He has admired his neighbor and classmate, Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar, ever since their childhood friendship died and they went separate ways, until one night when she knocks on his window at midnight and literally climbs back into his life. They spend a night of revenge together dolling out punishments to Margo’s popular friends who have betrayed her, and Q figures the next day at school will be different. He’s right, but things don’t turn out the way he’d hoped or thought they would. Suddenly, Margo is a mystery, and she’s left clues for Q to unravel. He soon finds himself learning more and more about the girl he thought he knew.
I’m still not exactly sure how I feel about this text. All of John Green’s novels have a certain addictive quality to them- they’re the type you can’t put down, and Paper Towns definitely lives up to this expectation. The characters, especially Margo and Q are very deep, and you really feel like you’ve gotten to know them by the end. Green’s characters face real issues, like sex, drinking, wanting to be a part of the ‘popular crowd’, graduating and moving on from what they’ve always known. I like that Paper Towns doesn’t dumb these issues down. They’re very real, important situations, and John Green does a good job presenting them and making them seem as important as they really are.
Another ‘pro’ about this novel is the literary references it contains. One of the clues Margo leaves for Q is the book of poetry Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. She has highlighted certain passages from ‘Songs of Myself’, and Q must figure out what these passages mean to Margo in order to solve the mystery. In the beginning, Q can’t even begin to decipher the poem, and he has real hard time with it. But his drive and determination to solve the mystery that is Margo forces him to keep reading and trying, and eventually he figures out the poem even further than is necessary to get the clue from Margo, and he ends up really liking the it. I really enjoyed the idea having Q struggle with poetry in this novel, because it’s something that so many students encounter in high school. The fact that Q keeps trying to interpret it for his own reasons, and eventually ends up liking the poem is just another part of the whole book that is great. It would be a cool idea to have students simultaneously study “Song of Myself” and see if the novel helps them to learn the meaning of the poem, or if they agree with the interpretations made by Margo and Q.
I also like the message that John Green sends about the popular crowd. In the end, Q finds out that Margo, the most popular girl in the whole school is also just another kid struggling to fit in, because she’s really pretending to be someone she isn’t around her popular friends.
The development of the story is very well crafted, the story moves along well with no plot issues that I came across, I felt the whole story developed at a decent pace, and there were definitely no spots that I wanted to skip through or skim. Because the text has sort of an underlying mystery to it, it really helped me to move through quickly, as I was on the edge of my seat wanting Q to solve the mystery the whole time.
All of these great aspects aside, the text definitely has some issues, and is not perfect. One of my main issues from the text is the language. I found myself wondering ‘do kids really talk like this now?” It hasn’t been that long since I was a senior in high school, and my little brother is still in high school, so though I’d love to give John Green the benefit of the doubt, I’m pretty sure his language is severely off. I’m not sure whether Green just didn’t do enough research, or if he’s just trying too hard, but I was a bit annoyed with the characters’ unrealistic speech. I’ve been trying to do some research myself, to see if I’m alone in this stance, and I’m not. For example, on page 14, “Bro, you should just hit that…God, that is one candy-coated honeybunny.” Guys don’t really call girls “honeybunnies”, and they definitely don’t do it 4 times in one conversation as is found in Paper Towns. Another example where the language doesn’t quite match up is on page 25. Q says to Margo “I’m IMing with Ben Starling.” As someone who grew up when IM was coming out, and someone who still uses IM, I picked out the fake sounding language right away. You don’t IM with someone, you just IM them. I don’t know why, and to be honest there’s no real rule, it’s just that that isn’t how kids say it, and little tiny discrepancies like that are something kids will notice and think ‘this book is written by an old guy.’
Also, the stereotypical group of friends is present in this book, and it really annoys me. There’s the token black character who says things like ‘bro’ and ‘your mom really likes the brothers’, the rowdy friend who gets too drunk at parties and generally embarrasses himself, the computer whiz whose name is of course ‘Radar’ (who also happens to be the same character as the black guy) who can do almost anything on his palm pilot, and Quentin, who’s the nerdy guy trying to fit in but secretly wants to score a hot popular girl.
Another problem with this text lies in the fact that John Green does a lot of ‘telling’ where he should be ‘showing’. Anyone who has had any sort of creative writing experience has probably come across this problem, or been critiqued for doing this very thing, so it’s not something that’s easy to accomplish, but Green needs to work on it. Q will tell us how ‘awesome’ Margo is, and how it’s hard for him to explain how ‘awesome’ she is, where he really should have had Margo’s actions, thoughts and words speak for themselves.
This novel is also shockingly similar to John Green’s other novels, as well as the young adult novel As Simple As Snow by Gregory Galloway. John Green definitely has a certain M.O.: The main character is always a nerdy guy, who’s clever, witty and smart, but deep down wants to be with a cute popular girl. Something triggers an emotional journey into self for this character, and during this journey he makes a realization about himself, and realizes what’s keeping him from getting what he wants. This novel sticks very strictly to that M.O., as did An Abundance of Katherines and Looking for Alaska.
Gregory Galloway’s novel, As Simple As Snow is about a girl named Anna who is just like Margo, except she’s not popular. She has the same mysterious air about her, she’s cute, quirky and fun just as Margo is, and Galloway’s main character, who remains unnamed, falls in love with Anna in a short period of time (just as Q does), and then she disappears, leaving clues behind for him. Paper Towns was so incredibly similar to this story, that it lost some credibility for me in that respect.
Though these novels are similar in plot points, they are not trying to make the same point though. The point of Paper Towns is that we don’t always know people they way we think we do. Q and all of his classmates think they have Margo all figured out, and it turns out they are very wrong about her. This novel is also about love, and going the distance for people you care about. It’s about different types of relationships, and the importance of friends.
If this novel shares similarities with any of our texts, it would be Speak. Margo is similar to Melinda in a couple different respects. They’re both hiding secrets inside and putting on fake fronts so that they won’t be forced to tell others what’s really going on. They both are also having issues with fitting in (though opposite issues: Margo fits in for acting like someone she’s not, Melina doesn’t fit in because of who she is because of her secret).
I’m still unsure whether or not I would teach this text. The text could be a bit controversial with parents, as most of John Green’s texts contain salty language and sexual encounters. His book Looking for Alaska is commonly banned, because of a scene containing oral sex. I don’t think this text contains anything more sexual than what we’ve read so far in class, but the little sexual remarks and connotations happen much more frequently in this text than others, making it a potential problem. The bigger problem is that these sexual remarks aren’t even realistic, and it’s like Green was trying too hard to add them, like he wrote the novel and then went back and stuck them in so that the younger generation would find the book funny and contemporary. For example, on page 14, “Bro, I saw your mom kiss you on the cheek this morning, and forgive me, but I swear to God I was like, man, I wish I was Q. And also, I wish my cheeks had penises.” This is so blatantly not the kind of thing teenagers say. It’s like Green tried to take a ‘your mom’ joke way too far, and this is what he ended up with.
I did really enjoy reading the book, even if my critique has been seemingly more negative than positive. The scenes are well described, the twists and turns in the novel are not predictable, most of the happenings are plausible, and other than some of the “off” teen lingo, the characters are generally very funny, clever and enjoyable. The Leaves of Grass aspect of the novel could also provide for some great lessons.
However, while it does have potential for some great lessons, I’m just not sure if students would go for it or not. The central problem of the text lies in the fact that the language, characters and plot are ideal for 9th&10th grade students (maybe 11th but that might be pushing it), but some of the metaphors might be lost on students of this age. It’s not so much that they wouldn’t be able to understand the metaphors, but the text is too rich in metaphorical meaning especially in the last few pages, that some of it was even lost on me, and I sat wondering whether seniors in high school really sit together and discuss the metaphorical meaning of their own lives, comparing themselves to leaves of grass. I felt that it was very fake, and that most students wouldn’t be able to relate to the pages and pages of the connections between Margo and Q’s lives to Walt Whitman’s poetry. The idea would have worked much better if the metaphors had been left to the students and teachers to find, rather than having Q and Margo discuss them in plain black and white, going over every single painstaking similarity and connection. This novel leaves very little to be discussed or interpreted by students and teachers together, because John Green spells it out for us paragraph after paragraph. He does all the work for us, and doesn’t let us make the connections on our own.
Overall, this is a well written and crafted story that I would recommend to students for entertainment purposes, but I wouldn’t teach the text myself. Any interesting text with great vocabulary and character development is a good thing, because it’s important that kids read, no matter what they’re reading. This book has that addictive quality that will keep students reading, and will encourage them to find more books like Paper Towns and read more often. I just feel that it doesn’t have quite enough substance to teach in a classroom setting.
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