Why I Didn’t Like Paper Towns by John Green

Paper Towns by John Green follows the life of senior Quentin “Q” Jacobsen in his last month of high school. His life is pretty normal, even a bit boring. That is, until his old friend Margo Roth Spiegelman comes back into his life (who, coincidentally, Q has loved all his life). They have a wild night of getting revenge on all of Margo’s enemies and breaking and entering into various places. But in the morning, Margo is just…gone. No note, no voicemail, nothing. Q then spends the rest of his senior year trying to find Margo by decoding the cryptic clues she left for him.

I have a lot of things to say about this book, but one of the first things I notice in a book is the characters’ personalities. And I have to say, there was nothing special about the characters in this book. Q is your stereotypical “nerdy kid” who thinks way too much about everything. I guess he has some character development over the course of the book, but it’s kind of hard to tell. His best friends really don’t have that much of a personality. Margo’s best friend, Lacey, is also very stereotypical. She’s just a popular girl who everyone is obsessed with. Although, we get to know Lacey a lot more over the course of the book, and I like her character more at the end of the book. Margo’s case is a little more complicated. Because she’s missing for basically all the book, we only get to hear other people’s perspectives of her (especially Q’s glorified version of her, which gets very old after a while). Also, this is probably just me, but I really hated one of Q’s friends, Ben. He’s way too overconfident, annoying, and has this weird habit of calling girls “honeybunnies”. That last bit really rubbed me the wrong way.

Overall, this book progresses very slowly. It takes forever for Q to figure out Margo's clues, which is really boring to sit through. Then, suddenly, the book speeds up when he finally figures it out. It becomes very fast paced, which I actually enjoyed. But the ending is dragged out so much. There is a lot of long dialogue at the end, which I guess is better than more of Q’s internal monologue. But I would think, with such a long ending, there would be some decent closure. But nope, not at all. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s more of a choose-your-own ending kind of situation, which I really don’t like! I just want a satisfying ending.

At first, I thought this book would be really cliché. You know, a nerdy guy loves a  popular girl, typical stuff. This book was not that, but not in a good way. I actually found this book really hard to understand. Margo’s clues are really cryptic, no wonder Q had a hard time solving them, and I had a hard time understanding them. This book is also chock-full of strange metaphors. It’s kind of like poetry, except it didn’t make sense to me. It has all these confusing analogies to describe character’s emotions, which would have been fine if they were only in the book once in a while. But it was a recurring theme.

Honestly, unless you are super intrigued by the plot of this book, I would pass on reading it. I really like mystery books, but this one missed the mark for me. 

- Arshia