so i read, watched, and loved the fault in our stars, however, the same can not be said for paper towns. to be completely honest, they shouldn't have turned it into a movie. the storyline is not that interesting and the characters are not as likable. plus i just watched the trailer and it looks horrible. maybe its because i know the ending, but it seems like a lot of hype for a lame ending.
and i need to read the rest of his books, but if the rest of his books are like paper towns, it might be safe to say that green is a one hit wonder.
paper towns is like the poor man's the virgin suicides. the obsessive neighbor, untoucable free spirited girl, but no interesting chronicles of her life and definitely none of the deep and insightful coming of age knowlege.
the novel is told from the point of view of q . he has spent his life, all 17 years of it (i think), admiring and loving his neighbor margo roth spiegelman from afar. they used to be best friend, their defining moment of friendship was when they found a dead body at age 9. margo became a popular party girl while q became a nerd that hung out with band kids. i am not hating, q and i would have ran in the same circles, if we went to high school together. i liked his friend radar especially due to its obsession with updating a wikipedia-esque website, but ben was annoying and i would have hated him in real life.
any hoot, margo discovered her boyfriend was cheating on her and goes on this crazy revenge spree and enlisted the help of q. margo gave q a talk about paper towns and how people are fake and not as the appear. the next day she disappeared.
q was worried that she committed suicide (i have to admit by the end i wish that she had.) he believed that she left him clues to find her. it started with a woody guthrie picture (quick sidenote as i was reading about guthrie's poster and his guitar that read "this machine kills facists." i was like where have i read that? and i remember that steve martin's memoir mentioned it as well.) and leads him to developments that were never completed.
q did a lot of bad searching for margo, seriously how did he not realize that those holes in the wall were left by marks on a map?!?! he spent a lot of time overanalyzing leaves of grass, i love whitman but green was trying to hard there. q discovered he is capable
of being adventurous, realized he put margo on a pedestal. oh and he missed out on alot of partying before graduation.
in the end, he learned (and i did as well, maybe the only great thing to happen from reading this) that a paper town was a fake town that map makers made up and placed on maps to discover copyright infringement. and on a paper town near nyc, there was a post about the population being one until some date. which turned out to be the day after graduation, but since it took 22 hours to drove, q missed his graduation.
q and his friends (btw another big critique is that it lacey and ben as a couple happened really quickly!) go on a road trip. and though fun, they were really geeky about it, i mean really would teens be that good about planning to the minute?
anyway, they found margo. she didn't commit suicide but she was a bitch. she and q resolved life, realizing that they both cared for these ideas of each other but not that actual person. it was supposed to be deep but i felt like green was trying to hard.
in the end, i was disappointed by the ending, because after all of q's effort, margo was still a beezy. and i know they talked it out but still it seemed like a big waste of time. though i guess q did grow as a person.
all in all, this book was lame.
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