John Green – Paper Towns

.John Green’s Paper Towns has only just seen a British release, although it has been available in America and Canada for a couple of years now. Having been enthusiastically pointed towards it on various occasions, I was excited to finally get my paws on it a week or so ago. It’s one of the most fun, smart and touching books I’ve read for some time, and certainly one of the best YA novels I’ve ever enjoyed. The story revolves around the mercurial and enigmatic Margo Roth Spiegelman, a young woman about to graduate high school. She knocks on the door of her friend – and the novel’s protagnist – Quentin Jacobsen one evening and persuades him to join her on a crazy night of pranks and revenge. The next day, Quentin – who’s been head over heels for Margo for years –  finds out that Margo hasn’t turned up to school, and it soon becomes apparent that she’s run away or vanished. But Q quickly realizes that Margo seems to have left him some clues to her fate, and the narrative follows Q and his nerdy, quick-witted friends Ben and Radar as they try to find out what’s happened to Margo.

Green’s novel is eminently readable – I brushed through Paper Towns in just a few days – and extremely funny. I caught myself chuckling out loud on many occasions. “Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the American government believes diplomacy alone will not be sufficient and that force will be required.” The wit is one of the three things that make this novel so enjoyable: the others are a fast-paced and well-plotted narrative; and a genuine sense of profundity and thoughtfulness, as the motif of the “paper towns” is developed by first Margo and then, later, Q. (A “paper town” is a fictional place surreptitiously added to maps by cartographers in an attempt to “copyright” their maps; any other map they see which also contains this fictional place, they will know it’s a rip-off of their product). Green uses the idea to talk about the banality of suburban life and the feelings of helplessness and lack of self-understanding that these teenagers are feeling. The situation of these kids – about to leave high school, fretting over dates for prom and starting to realise that they will soon be leaving the school and one another for the final time, along with the maelstrom of emotions that leaving entails – will be familiar to everyone. It is a frequently genuinely touching novel interspersed with moments of hilarity and excitement, as well as John Green using the narrative to plug his favourite bands, which frankly I have no problem with at all when he has such good taste (the Mountain Goats, Billy Bragg & Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue, the Violent Femmes, all get a mention). Anyone who enjoys YA fiction, or really, anyone who enjoys exciting and intelligent writing, should read this book. I adored it.

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