The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, with bonus giveaway!

What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. The Beatles. And me.

Wait, that's a different story about young people with cancer falling in love.

So, The Fault in Our Stars. When I first heard that the newest John Green was about kids was cancer, I was pretty uninterested. I mean, really? Someone is gonna fall in love, someone is gonna die, I will cry. The main characters are all going to be wordy, insightful geeks. Then I read Amanda's review and I admit, she hooked me. I stalked the library, who still hasn't seen fit to get a copy. Then one day right after we got our tax return I saw a signed copy on the shelf at the local Wal-marts. With the Wal-mart discount, it was something like $12.  I brought it home. (Mine is signed in blue ink, I see mention of the color of ink, but I have no idea why it matters. Someone tell me?) And it should be noted that I read this in one very long sitting on Friday while I was recovering from my turn with the Horrible Horkfest of 2012 and spent the entire day on the couch, so I read much of it in a fever haze.

Hazel has terminal cancer. Augustus had cancer. They meet in Support Group, where they both enjoy a little bit of intelligent conversation and ever so gently making fun of the other people. In a surprisingly short time, they are spending all their time together, but Hazel is determined not to fall in love with him. Of course.  How can you fall in love at all when it is a given that one of you is not going to make it? How can you be alive, with all that entails, and at the same time very definitely dying? Sounds horribly depressing, right? But if you've read Green, you know it's not. It's definitely sad, and I did cry, but the book itself is pretty good. It managed to somehow both laugh at cancer and respect it, which seems to be an awfully thin line to walk, but saved the book from being a sappy mess or outright cruel.

Ok, so giveaway. Do you know what that opening quote is from? Leave the answer in the comments and I'll pick a winner on Friday. Honor system here, don't cheat and google it and don't look at the other answers first. The prize? No idea! Something fun though.

Paper Towns by John Green

Here we go with John Green: Take 3. Paper Towns is Green's most recent novel and with it, I've now read all three of his novels. (I haven't read the anthology yet, though it is on the TBR.) Paper Towns is about a smart teenage boy who is about to graduate and who is obsessed with his ideal of a specific girl who vanished. Wait. Isn't that the plot of Looking for Alaska? No, no, it's An Abundance of Katherines. Wait, no Colin had just graduated. Must be Paper Towns. So which one is it??

Ok, so here's what is says on the flap:

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 the girl he thought he knew.

So. Margo disappears, but not before leaving some hastily thought out clues. Despite graduation and finals approaching, Q spends all of this time obsessively trying to figure them out and tracking Margo's every moment. He firmly believes that she wants him to find her and that she has set it up so that he will find her by a certain date. Q is likable. He's smart, but not brilliant. He is looking for Margo for all the right reasons- because he is worried. Q has a couple of friends- Radar the internet obsessed and Ben, the girl obsessed, who help him find Margo. For the first chapter or so I was certain that I would not be able to finish the book, Ben is THAT annoying. He isn't such a major character as the first chapter would lead you to believe though, so I was able to continue. I didn't so much like Margo, and the ending left me a bit angry at her. I understand what Green was trying to do, but it was too heavy handed and obvious and I didn't buy the ending. Overall, I enjoyed the book but didn't love it. I'd put this one second to Looking for Alaska (my review), with An Abundance of Katherines (my review) a distant third.

Here's the problem though- when you're reading the third John Green, and I believe this would be true if you read them in any order, it is impossible NOT to compare them. All three seem to follow the same formula- smart kid, senior year in high school (Pudge, Q, Colin.) An unobtainable girl (Alaska, Margo, Katherine.) Annoying friend (The Colonel, Hassan, Ben/Radar.) An intelligent gimmick (Famous last words, Leaves of Grass, Mathmatical formula.) Parents who aren't involved (Boarding school, road trip, shrinks.) This doesn't make them less enjoyable, but it is inescapable.



Looking for Alaska by John Green
Dutton Books
2008
305 pages


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An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

An Abundance of Katherines is my second book by John Green. I read Looking for Alaska in 2007 (review) and really loved it, but for some reason it took me this long to get around to my second. Unfortunately, I didn't love Katherines quite as much as Alaska. It was good and I read it in a short amount of time (which really counts for something when you tend to read 4 or 5 books at once.)

An Abundance of Katherines is about Colin- once a child prodigy, but not clearly on his way to adult genius. He's just broken up with the last in a very long string of Katherines and is obsessed with finding a mathematical formula that will predict when a couple will break up, and who will do the dumping. To distract him from this, his best pal Hassan takes him on a road trip to Gutshot, TN where the boys find a job and make some friends and, presumably, learn some Important Life Lessons.

I don't know why this one wasn't as appealing to me. I love the math bits (not REAL math, so don't be turned off by it!) and I loved Lindsey, the girl they met. I enjoyed some, but not all, of the interactions between Colin and Hassan. Reviewers seem to love Hassan's humor, but really I just found him a little annoying. The boys are fond of saying "Fugging" in place of another F-word, and they say it a LOT. At one point in the book another character asks why they don't say the real thing, and they have a reason, but regardless of reason it got annoying. (I'm not usually turned off by bad language, this just seemed silly to me though.)

Overall, it was ok. It wasn't what I was expecting, but it doesn't turn me off John Green. I have Paper Towns in my stack for the Read-A-Thon this weekend and I really hope to get to it. I'd like to see which of the previous two is the aberration.

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Looking for Alaska by John Green

Several weeks ago, right around the time Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out, the Book Dragon (now Outside of a Dog) posted a link to Brotherhood 2.0. Brotherhood 2.0 is a video blog project between two brothers- Hank and John Green. Over the next few weeks I (some would say obsessively) watched ALL the videos- one a weekday from January 1, 2007 until now. I love it. I love the brothers. One of the brothers is John Green, a published award-winning young adult author. Once I finished catching up with the vlog, I found myself having withdrawals, so I headed to the library where I checked out Looking for Alaska by John Green.

One night as I was trying to convince myself to read something on a challenge list (yeah right), I picked up the book and read the "About the Author." Now, having seen all the videos, I have a pretty good idea of John's (first name basis, see?) history and life, but one sentence in the bio really jumped out at me- "John Green attended a boarding school in Alabama not entirely unlike Alaska's Culver Creek." What?? Are you serious? I attended a boarding school in Alabama! I am only a couple years older than John Green! This spurred a fast and furious internet search until wikipedia told me that, alas, we did not attend the same school. (For the record, I attended the Alabama School of Math and Science and he went to Indian Springs School. Mine- public; his- not so much.)

This still spurred me on to reading the book. Looking for Alaska is about Miles who is a first time student, a junior, at an Alabama boarding school. It's about making friends, loyalty, growing up, love, doubts, everything we all did in high school. There is an abundance of smoking, drinking, and a good bit of sex talk. This was so much like my high school it's was spooky. The book isn't broken into chapters, but rather sections are titled as a countdown (ninety-eight days before, four days before, twenty-one days after, etc.) Obviously, Something Happens and the rest of the book deals with the aftermath of that.

I have to say I loved it. The story isn't particularly unique, but it is very clear that John Green remembers high school clearly. I don't know if this will resonate with people who didn't attend a boarding school, and honestly, I have a hard time separating the book from my experience. Between the vlog, and the shared high school experience, I thought this was an excellent book. If you aren't already a John Green fan or a boarding school alum, I don't know, it might not be for you. It's not a book that avoid touchy subjects and there's a lot of hand-wringing in the last half. I thought it did an excellent job of showing how fast and tight friendships are formed in a dorm. Overall, great book, and I'll be looking for his other book An Abundance of Katherines.