Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: Looking for Alaska, by John Green

The Story: This is a pretty basic YA novel: Miles is kind of quirky.  His particular quirk is that he loves to know people’s last words before they die.  He has about a zillion that he’s memorized and he reads tons of biographies so that he can collect more.

He heads to a boarding school and meets more quirky people.  His roommate goes by the name The Colonel.  Down the hall is a girl, Alaska, who Miles takes an immediate liking to.  She’s also, you know, full of quirk. They become this tight little group with the addition of a couple other guys that hang around sometime.

They are smart and rebellious.  They talk about “real” things and get plastered in the woods.  Alaska is obsessed with great pranks. The whole first half of the book develops this friendship and these three really solid characters and their friendship.

Then something pretty shocking and horrible happens and they have to use this friendship to get through it together.

What I Thought: I grabbed this at a library book sale because I have a few friends who gush and gush about John Green. I had watched some of his vlogs and have to admit that his website is pretty much amazing. I cannot resist his unapologetic nerdiness.

All that to say, I really really wanted to like this.  And I did. Some.

Here’s what I liked:  I liked that it dealt with real issues and instead of just being these annoying high schoolers, they were actually high schoolers with a little bit of brains.  I liked that they talked about stuff that mattered.  I liked that they had a strong friendship and that that friendship was confusing and, at times, hard to maintain.  I think that all of that is really realistic and pretty much what my high school experience was like. I loved the structure: that it was divided into “before” and “after.”  The suspense of what lead to the “after” made the first half of the book so much more enjoyable for me.

Here’s what I didn’t like:  These people were all cardboard cutouts.  Their little quirks were probably meant to make them seem more real, but it just seemed like the author was trying too hard.  I just felt like the three main characters were absolute cliches.  So was the principal and all of the “sideline friends.”  Meh. I wanted them to eventually get a little bit of heart, but it just never really happened.  Even the romantic tension between Miles and Alaska just seemed so forced. At a certain point, a lot of the book just started seeming soap opera-y to me and I ended the book just feeling kind of bored.

Conclusion: Just medium. There are some real issues (friendship, life & death, family connections, destiny, the past) that creep up here, but without strong characters to carry it, parts of the book seem to fizzle. If you love YA, give ‘er a go, but don’t make this your first big plunge into the genre.  There’s better stuff out there.