Hi there! Welcome to my review of Paper Towns by John Green, and don’t worry, I won’t give you spoilers on the book (because you should read it yourself, and I’ll let you know before I do) let me give you a quick summary and review in a section I’ll title…
Does the blurb hold true?
According to Oxford Languages, a blurb is “a short description of a book, movie, or other product written for promotional purposes and appearing on the cover of a book or in an advertisement.”
These are great for getting great works out to more people, but sadly nowhere in this definition does it say that the blurb will show you a glimpse of the true essence of the work in question, like netflix episode summaries for example! they always make me feel bored right before starting another one, so let’s see if Paper Towns’ blurb does any better.
“Who is the real Margo?
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 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…”
Quite frankly, this blurb is amazing. It sums up only a fourth of the book’s plot, leaving the rest for you to discover, and teases the main idea of the story is, “the closer he gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he knew”
Did I enjoy it?
Immensely, but I must admit that the first chapter after the prologue is the most difficult because you have to read somewhat rude and insincere higher schoolers’ dialogue. (I don’t like Ben).
Other than that, I was excited to read this book every night I had the chance to. Quentin goes through a very real feeling coming of age story despite the odd girl involved, and Margo is someone I wish I could talk to outside of a plotted story, she seems like she has a lot of interesting ideas.
I’d readily recommend this book to anyone looking for a fun and enlightening read, because their story might teach you a thing or two about what loving someone can look like.
Here come the spoilers.
alright, last call, I really wanna go deeper and tell you what I learned from this book. I don’t want to tell you everything though because I know some of you are still reading even though you don’t have the book.
Here’s the big idea. There’s three big metaphors for how we relate to other people in this book; strings, grass, and cracked vessels. That sounds very esoteric I know, so let me give the barest background for them. The strings come from a section at the beginning where young small child versions of Q and Margo find a man who committed suicide in their city’s park, the two’s investigation lead them to the man’s apartment and after a neighbor gives them the details, Margo says that “maybe all the strings inside him broke.” This analogy sticks around for a while, but it has its problems. Margo references it in her revenge fest with Q before disappearing, and actually makes Q think she killed herself for about half the book, and I believed it right along with him. I was thinking something like “ah, so this is why the book is so popular, it tackles suicide.” But I was wrong, extremely wrong, eventually the tension turned into curiosity and then hope.
You see, in the clues Margo left before she disappears, she left Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself. She circled several parts to serve as clues on purpose, but the ones she circled for herself were what really helped Q ‘find’ her. After a lot of rereading and understanding (because the poem is very long and I just failed to read more than 4 stanzas) Q realizes that Whitman is talking about how we are all connected to one another, and he uses grass as a metaphor quite often. Whitman has some part where he says “I become the wounded”, as though he can really feel what they feel, and Q admits that he can’t do that. I don’t think I could either, I could only attempt to understand their pain. This all really resonated with me because poetry is what I and my past girlfriend bonded over, so seeing Q do the same thing from a distance really warmed me up to him
And then, he does the impossible, he realizes where Margo will be. So he gathers up his friends for one big road trip to the ‘paper town’ Agloe, New York. That was really cool because I had watched a video about John Green talking about that exact thing years ago. And they find her, and Margo and Q get to really talk. Q comes up with the great metaphor that we’re all cracked vessels, able to see other people through the cracks in our life. I understood that. Maybe that’s why my love failed and Q got a world trotting and wanderlust filled girl to like him back. I didn’t have enough cracks, nor the heart to break out and understand what she was going through, or maybe our cracks just didn’t quite line up. I don’t know, but I hope I can find connection with someone else like we used to have.
I don’t have much more to say. Read the book yourself, it’s fantastic.
Next Saturday,
The 8th, I will be reviewing a cool rpg system called Ryuutama. It’s a Japanese tabletop rpg that focuses on traveling and having a world full of dragons, so look forward to the fiction I make that’s inspired from that, because there’s no way I could add anything meaningful to Paper Towns. It has an ambiguous ending about what Q and Margo’s future will hold, but it’s supposed to be that way. No fanfiction I could write would satisfy me or you.