Paper Towns by John Green

I’ll admit when I saw this on the class list my immediate reaction was not excitement (Those of you from my class now know my dirty secret: the incomplete).  It was okay.  I had nothing against the book but nothing about it really caught me looking at the cover and reading blurbs.  I suppose part of it is that it is not even the story that really got me.  It was Green’s writing.  Someone else might have told the exact same story and I would have been hardly as intrigued.  I was a lot like Q when I was in high school so well behaved and boring.  The interactions with Ben and Radar had me chuckling on a regular basis.  Though exaggerations I could see them in people I know.  Recently I read something talking about how we put such a focus on protagonist age in YA, but how the portrayal doesn’t really change.  The characters are written by adults and without a label it’s hard to tell the difference between a thirteen year old and a seventeen year old.  These characters are all 18 but I can relate at 24 and I’m sure younger ones could as well.  I could never decide if I liked Margo or not, but I think I’m supposed to feel that way.  There are too many Margos to really know how you feel.  I loved the contrasting covers from the beginning, but even more having read the book to appreciate how differently you can see Margo.  (Yes, I am going to start trying to have covers on the blog.  My copy is the blue by the way!  We’ll see how it lasts.  If I like it I might even do some back adding.)