Paper Towns by John Green

“Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is.”

Rating: 4/5.

Summary: Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life - dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge - he follows.

After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues - and they're for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees of the girl he thought he knew.

Review: Ah, Paper Towns, how do I describe thee?

It was a long wait for this novel and even with my hopes high for this novel and expectations even higher I still managed to love this novel. Though, I found that I enjoyed Looking for Alaska more, Paper Towns still has heaps to offer.

I expected nothing but brilliance from John Green and I got what I wanted from this novel, sometimes as I read this novel I was astounded by how deep and wonderful the characters were. I loved what this book had to say about our perceptions of people, our imaginations and how they make us judge or assume what people are like.

The characters were amazing, Q was sweet, sometimes he irritated me, but throughout the novel I learnt to live with it. Radar well, everything about him made me laugh, Ben was probably my favourite character, he was hilarious and there was something about him that I loved. Margo though, she was an amazing character that I to an extent admired, she made me laugh and made me all teary and sad, she was delightfully complex.

John does an amazing job of writing for and about teenagers, I loved how the characters were angst ridden and I found them easy to relate to.

“Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters."

This novel was hilarious all the way through, it had me laughing constantly.

The mystery was interesting, the clues I found hard to piece together and even though Margo was gone for the majority of the novel, I felt like the clues allowed me to get to know her. Even though the majority of the time I got to know her through Q's undying obsession that at points through the novel irked me, something about the way he went about looking for Margo at times annoyed me, but only for short bursts in time, then I was wrapped up in the awesomeness of the novel again.

Nerdfighters will adore all the talk of awesome in this novel, I sure did.

The ending, my oh my, does it have me wondering. It was shocking, and I must admit that I had a bit of a jaw dropping moment, I would not have picked what happened and the reactions and well, everything. I thought that the ending was great, I liked how ideal it was and then how it left you wanting to know more and more about the characters and what they actually did after you left them.

“The town was paper, but the memories were not."

This wonderful novel gets four out of five from me, it was amazing and I had a lot of fun reading it. I would recommend it to anyone who reads YA because it's a great book and I would also recommend John's other books (though I have only read Looking for Alaska) because he is an author that you do not want to miss out on.