Here's an unpopular opinion on a popular author: John Green is not helping the young adult genre. In his popular books Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns, and The Fault in Our Stars, John Green is hypocritical, sets unrealistic expectations for his readers and worst of all exploits his fictional characters and the very real tragedies they undergo.
In his 2005 breakthrough novel Looking for Alaska, John Green penned a novel from the first person perspective of Miles Halter, known as a Pudge, a junior in high school who is attending boarding school in Alabama. Infatuated by the mysterious Alaska Young, whom he quickly forms an unhealthy obsession over, Miles is blind to the darkness surrounding his crush.
Having experienced the loss of her mother at a young age, Alaska is deeply depressed and acts erratically to hide this depression. She drinks to excess, engages in risky behavior, and asserts dominance over her friend group as a way to take control. She ends up taking her own life at the end of the novel by drunkenly crashing her car into an upturned truck in the middle of the road during the dead of night.
Somehow, Miles is unable to fully realize how disturbed the apple of his eye is. He constantly describes her as beautiful, wonderful, and a "hurricane," causing impressionable readers to see her as this way, too. Alaska is a hurricane- erratic, unpredictable, stormy, and occasionally, sweet when the eye of the storm takes precedence. However, Miles only sees the good in her. Green's point is that this is a dangerous perspective to have; Miles quite possibly could have helped Alaska before her demise, but he stood from afar making goo-goo eyes at her. This would have been a great point if Green didn't reuse this premise for his next novel.
In 2008, John Green's Paper Towns, another first-person novel set in a Floridian suburb. Again, there is a young man, Quentin Jacobsen, known as Q, who is in love with another quirkily-named girl, Margo Roth Spiegelman, whom he barely knows a thing about. Groundbreaking. He and Margo are next-door neighbors, and one night, Margo comes to Q's window to recruit him on an all-night journey of vengeance-fulled prank pulling. Q drives, Margo schemes, and just when Q thinks he may have finally landed the girl of his dreams, Margo disappears the next day.
Also emotionally disturbed, Margo is the most popular girl in school who shields her sadness with sarcasm and wit. She decides to run away and leaves cryptic yet highly personalized clues for a frantic Q to follow but once she is found, Margo insists that she never really wanted to be found. She claims that she can't be the girl Q and everyone else wants her to be, so she drove all the way to New York to be her "true self," whoever that may be. Like Alaska, Margo decides to leave everything behind instead of actually dealing with the problems at hand.
In arguably his most popular novel, The Fault in Our Stars, John Green takes a break from his strange fascination with mentally unstable young women and instead makes a profit off of romanticizing cancer. Severely-ill teenagers Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus "Gus" Waters meet, fall in love, and go on an international adventure despite having crippling diseases. Their relationship progresses quickly and dramatically, and their fairy-tale like romance seems almost too good to be true. It is, since Gus dies at the end, but before that, there are a handful of moments that depict the grim reality of life with cancer.
Some of the events that take place in this novel are impossible: how can two very sick young people travel to Amsterdam completely unscathed and have sex with no difficulty despite Hazel Grace needing a breathing tubes for every waking moment (which she detached during this part)? Green's romanticization of a very serious issue is a disservice to readers as well as his characters. For a more realistic account of life with this awful disease, try Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper, where the characters navigate and rearrange life with an ill loved one rather than go one romantic dinners and drink champagne in a foreign country.
Aside from the cringe-worthy plots in the novels, Green's writing is riddled with hypocrisy, specifically in Paper Towns. There is a scene where the school bully was beating Q up until Q said the words "I'm a faggot." Q spends about a page saying that "faggot" is an offensive word and there is nothing wrong with being gay and even chastises others in the novel for using the slur. Valid, but Q undermines himself later in the book. In his inner monologue and in his language, Q uses the word "retarded," as do his friends, and no one bats an eye.
Why is it wrong to demean one group of people but perfectly acceptable to attack another group? It is never acceptable to make fun of someone for who they are; however, people who are homosexual are generally able to defend themselves in the face of deplorable hate speech, but people who have mental disabilities may not be able to do so. It is shameful that Green accepts and event promotes such hate towards a marginalized group in this novel, especially since members of this group may not be able to advocate for themselves.
Furthermore, Green promotes the trope of "the convenient black friend" in these two of these novels. Chip "The Colonel" Martin and Marcus "Radar" Lincoln from Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns, respectively, are the only two people of color mentioned in the novels. If Green was trying to diversify his characters, he failed miserably.
Every other character mentioned is white and often, they are not even explicitly described as such; Green expects the readers to assume colors. The movies Paper Towns and The Fault in Our Stars furthers this point as nearly every noteworthy character is white. If Green truly was trying to add diversity, perhaps he may have considered that black and white are not the only two skin colors in this world.
Readers, next time you are looking for something to read, perhaps try something different than John Green. No one can tell you what you can and can't read, but if you want books that address rather than romanticize teenage tragedy, you may want to try something else. As for you, John Green, perhaps consider writing novels that are actually helpful, not hypocritical.
