It wouldn’t be too far off to say that John Green is the most popular Young Adult author of today. Teenagers and other young adults often go crazy for his novels: they’re entertaining, relatable, and teach us something about life…right? The first of Green’s novels that I read was The Fault in Our Stars and I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t finish it in one sitting or that it didn’t make me bawl my eyes out multiple times; however, as I began reading Green’s other novels I started to find it more and more difficult to consider myself a fan of his work.

I will agree that The Fault in Our Stars is a wonderful book, but it is his other three novels, Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns, and An Abundance of Katherines with which I have a bone to pick. When judging only one of these novels by itself, there doesn’t seem to be an issue: the characters are quirky and the plot is full of adventure. Both these ingredients make for a good book, but, they don’t make for three good books. After reading Looking for Alaska and then Paper Towns directly after it, I was starting to notice a few trends:

1. The main character is a dorky, white boy who is in love with a beautiful, allegedly unattainable girl.
2. This boy has a best friend of color, who rarely serves as more than a plot device.
3. The majority of the characters have some sort of random quirk (i.e. they capitalize letters in the middle of words) and the person of color’s quirk is most likely related to his ethnicity (i.e. his parents have the world’s largest collection of black Santas).
4. In some way or another, this boy ends up with the girl, be it in a brief rendezvous or an actual relationship.
5. There’s a completely unambiguous message that teaches the readers some sort of life lesson that they probably already knew (i.e. you can’t predict everything).

When breaking down exactly how these points contribute to my dislike of Green as an author, it’s easiest to start off with how the lesson of Green’s novel Looking for Alaska completely diverted from the original message of the book, which was that people are just people and shouldn’t be idolized, when Green decided to have Alaska, the girl, die at the end. By killing Alaska, Green created a martyr who will always be this beautiful, tragically depressed, young blonde who can no longer do any wrong. Because he was completely unable to get his point across in this book, he wrote another novel, Paper Towns, to reiterate his point, in a more successful way. The end result of this is that we now have two mildly different versions of the exact same book.

Additionally, Green has mentioned that, in high school, he related to his main characters’ adoration of beautiful girls, which is why he creates these types of characters so often, but we got the point with the first book and we don’t need two more. Each of the trends listed above only provides for a generic teen romance novel that lacks complexity and original ideas, which is why it is far too easy to grow tired of reading his work.

Above any irritation I have with the repetitiveness of Green’s novels, my main issue is with how he demotes women and people of color, albeit in a slightly subtle way. By always making the girl in his novels some unattainable, gorgeous person, who is sought after by some dopey, teenage boy, Green is sending the message that women exist only to be admired by men. Green’s refusal to write a character of color in any other role than a sidekick, with a quirk related to his racial identity, creates the idea that that people of color exist only to 1) further the desires of white people and 2) provide ethnic diversity.

Though I once adored his novels, Green’s repetitive, unoriginal, and white male centered writing has stopped me from calling myself his fan any longer.