Paper towns by John Green
So if you happen to follow my reviews, or saw my review of The Fault in Our Stars, you will know that I fell in love with John Green's writing and I knew that I had to read more or his work (READ ALL THE JOHN GREEN BOOKS!) so I chose Paper Towns as my second read of his work, probably because of the title and cover which tune in with my desire to travel.
If you have read Paper Towns, you will know that it is not exactly about travelling, but it still has a big adventure with thrill and new experiences, fear and chemistry. Yet this is still not the adventure about this book that I think John Green intended to say with this novel, it is much deeper than that, like I have learnt all of his works are. They are insights into life from a perspective most forget to look from, or just over look and miss it.
The characters in Paper Towns are very real, normal high school students, written from a young boys perspective you see how life can be tough for a teenage boy who isn't that popular, gets bullied, and has a crush on a girl who is. But his life isn't terrible, because you don't need popularity to be happy, he has a group of friends, including his two best guy friends who both have personalities which made me laugh - a lot. His life is changed suddenly by Margo, a popular girl.. who although seems like she has everything... inside she feels she doesn't. Again, popularity isn't happiness.
It seems that Paper Towns underlining edges towards a persons desire to escape home, escape the people who have hurt them, escape the business, the blandness of a small town... onto something bigger, better... or to find safe so that peace of mind can be found.
And it shows how some people just aren't happy or don't belong in places and they cannot be tied down, that you have to let people go even if you could follow them cause they walk alone better.I felt i could really relate to Margo in this book, with her desires to be somewhere else, and the explanations about leaving really hit home.
It's a rather emotional book, but what John Green books aren't? I cried in places but also laughed, and tension was always between the pages.. Paper Towns is definitely one of those books I couldn't predict.. it surprised me all the way through. I think the journeys that the individual characters take have a lot of meaning to be learnt in them. A truly inspiring book, that deals with serious issues.
Of course a 5/5.. I'm not sure I can go any lower for a John Green! (though I still prefer The Fault in Our Stars)
Here are a few quotes to get your teeth into!
“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
“The town was paper, but the memories were not.”
“Maybe its like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And then things happen - these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack in places. And I mean, yeah once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And its only that time that we see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face to face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade, but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”
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