Personally, I think that out of the John Green works that I have read, “Paper Towns” is his best. I easily can make this statement based just on all the problems I found in his other novels. “Looking for Alaska”: I couldn’t even finish I was so annoyed with it. The other book of Mr. Green’s that I have read is the popular “The Fault in Our Stars”. Yes, I will admit that it was the first book I cried reading, and the movie gets me every time, and yes it is filled with an enormous amount of great quotes relating to life and love. But what it’s not, is relatable. All the die hard fans, and my father, will argue my point invalid, because it makes sense that two teens with cancer meet in therapy, but traveling to meet a hermit author in Amsterdam… c’mon John. That is why I proclaim that “Paper Towns” trumps them all. John Green writes a book that is completely relatable and brings light to one of life's hardest relationship problems.
Before we can get into my analysis, I feel you may need some background. Unless of course you have read it, then by all means skip these next few sentences. The novel is about a boy named Quentin Jacobsen who lives near Orlando, Florida. The flaw of Quentin is he is in love with Margo Roth Spiegelman, the mystifying girl next door. Quentin has relatable problems; he is a senior in high school nervous about graduation, he is a “band geek”, he's never really been in a relationship, and he is head over heels for his neighbor, who used to be his best friend back in the day, but who also went to high school and became too popular to talk to him. Quentin is restless with his average life and feels that he has not lived the full high school experience. He’s the perfect embodiment of an average teen in love with an above average girl.
Quentin’s whole life changes in just one night. Margo shows up to his window and whisks him away on an adventure for revenge… and then she disappears the next day. The rest of the story follows Quentin and his friends trying to decipher Margo’s clues and find her location. *Spoiler* The adventure ends when Margot is found, and to characters' and readers’ surprise, that was never her plan. Margot left clues to show she was safe, not because she wanted to be found. This brings us to the most important thing I have ever gotten from a book: the idea that a person is just a person.
John Green fully grasps what a “treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person” (Green 282). That quote blows my mind even now, almost eight months later. This brought a whole new light to my life. I believe at least 78% percent of things that disappoint me are because of something someone else has done, and I believe that probably 98% of those disappointments have been because I expected too much from them, or something too unrealistic. Honestly, why would Margo, who has run away multiple times, want Quentin, who she spent time with only once in over four years, to come and find her? Well, the truth was she did not, and he learned this the hard way, and what I learned is that every person is just another person. I learned that I cannot expect other people to do these extravagant things, especially if I would not expect to do them myself. Also I learned that all we have are ideas about people. You never really know a person; all you have to go off of is what you see and interpret, but someone else can see the same person and view them completely differently. Everyone saw Margo as something exciting, not as the sad, lonely girl she really was, and I feel this is something everyone in real life does. John Green really got me to realize how you never know someone until you have lived their life.
