Good Morning dear readers,
I am so exited to show you my first book review written in English. You are probably wondering which book I’ve chosen for this first review in a foreign language. Of course I’ve chosen My favest book ever : “Paper Towns”. I mean, who doesn’t love John Green? Oh, if you don’t , then this is not the right place for you. I am obsessed with John Green and all of his books so if you don’t wanna read me fangirling about him in every post then I suggest you to leave because this is not the right place for you. Otherwise, if you don’t like him but you’d love to know the reasons why I love him so much, I suggest you to keep reading this article and I wish I could make you change your mind because he is awesome or, at least, his mind is. This is more an experiment than an article. I am not sure if I’ll keep writing in English so I really hope you’ll like this first experiment, then, if you do, please comment and let me know. Fingers crossed.Wish me luckkkkkkk …
Title: Paper Towns
Author: John Green
Published: October 16th 2008
Publishing House: Penguin Books
Genre: Young Adult, contemporary, mystery, romance
Format: Paperback
Pages: 305
John Green is the celebrated author of the Printz Medal – Winning “Looking for Alaska” and the Printz Honor Book “An Abudance of Katherines”. He has been a commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and reviews books for publications, including the “New York Times” and “Booklist”. John was also one half (with his brother Hank) of the enormously popular video project “Brotherhood 2.0” , which has been watched more than 10 Million times. Although John grew up amid the subdivisions and theme parks of Orlando, he now lives with his wife, Sarah, in Indiana. His official website is : www.johngreenbooks.com
Plot:
Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs 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 mistery. 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…
Favourite Quotes:
“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. It’s not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It’s a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those culs-de-sac, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. 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.”
“At some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you’ll look back down and see that you floated away, too.”
“The fundamental mistake I had always made – and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make – was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”
“Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are.”
“I have never really thought of him as a person, either…. A guy whose strings were broken, who didn’t feel the root of his leaves of grass connected to the field, a guy who was cracked. Like me.”
“It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and constantly misimagined.”
My own Opinion:
“Paper Towns” is a fantastic, interesting and unique novel that talks about adolescense and all problems related to young people who do not find their own place in society.
This Novel’s main character is Quentin “Q” Jacobsen whose boring life is turned upside down when the adventorous Margo Roth Spiegelman moves in next door. Quentin and Margo were best friends during their childhood but then they grew apart and found each other only ten years later when Margo climbs into Q’s bedroom and invites him to join her on a mission of revenge before she leaves. When Q wakes up, he finds out she’s gone and feels empty so he starts finding clues in order to find her.
This is a very well written pot that mixes mistery and comedy in order to make the reader wants to read more and find out how the book ends.
The plot is divided into three sections named : “The Strings”, “The Grass” and “The Vessel” that represent the methaphors used in the whole book to describe today’s society. “The Strings” is about breaking and irreversible change, “The Grass” is about family and friends and “The Vessel” is about journeys and final destinations.
“Paper Towns” mostly talks about the problem of finding our own identity. Margo says that we are all paper girls and boys living in paper towns because in hers and in my opinion we care too much about what other people think about us. We let them build ideas of people with our same name and look but that are not ourselves. We let these ideas be more important than our own self . We grow up pretending to be someone else to please everyone’s ideas of us and at the end, we even forget who we really are.
To explain this point of view, the book focuses on each character’s different idea of Margo, and eventually their realisations that she is just a person like them.
Q is a teenager who is at a lost point in his life. He is looking for himself and wants to find his own place in society.
Margo can be considered more of an idea than a real character. Everybody has different memories of her, and so sees her differently. Q’s idea of Margo evolves through the story, and her character becomes more complex. Even when we discover the real Margo, she is still one of the most complicated characters of the whole novel.
Paper Towns was one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. It is my favourite novel because it talks about something close to me, my own situation and the society I live in.
The ending of this book will break your heart. It’s sad, but it feels right given the rest of the story. Everything is pulled together. I loved how the metaphors make everything flow together.
To conclude, Paper Towns is a remarkable and funny book with great characters and beautiful metaphors.
I would recommend it to fans of any other John Green book, but to be honest, I think anyone and everyone could gain something from reading this. So I recommend this book to everyone. I don’t consider it a Young Adult Novel I’d define it as a coming-of-age story for the themes treated.
Style: 9/10
Story: 9/10
Contents: 9/10
Final grade: 9/10
I hope you all liked this first article. Let me know if after reading my review, you changed your mind or at least, you’d love to give this author another chance. Let me know what you all think and if you’d like me to keep writing in English.
Thank you for your attention.
See you soon,
yours truly Consu
Paper Girl in a Paper Town 
Beautifully written 🌻
"Mi piace""Mi piace"