Paper Towns

I'm not Book Bundle, but a friend who agreed to pitch in now and again.

I recently finished Paper Towns by John Green. The book started out wonderfully and drew me in quite a bit. The author showing Quentin, the main character and his neighbor Margo as kids. They were riding their bikes to the park and discovered a dead body. The author then briefly showed how Margo was really curious and wanted to know what happened while Quentin goes home and his parents have a talk about life and death. I really wanted to know a bit more about that scene because the author really didn't go into it. I then struggled to find the connection of that scene to the sudden jump of Quentin and Margo in high school. The author didn't even show the connection until over halfway through.

I didn't find the book all that great after the initial chapter. The tone he had in the very beginning disappeared and it suddenly had a lot of similarities to An Abundance of Katherine's. While Colin only had one friend, Quentin had two and made more friends, much like Colin did after he relaxed a bit. Quentin had a life changing experience with Margo, Colin had a life changing experience with Lindsay. However Colin was a genius and Quentin was just an average teen who realized he loved Margo and that he hadn't really known her.

In addition to there being a lot of similarities with the main characters, the friends also had a lot of similarities. Both books had a Middle Eastern friend who was the closest to the main character who was a tad on the dorky side. Both books also had jocks and one main jock that screwed a girl over. I will admit that those are the only differences between the friends.

About the only differences I really saw in the characters were the girls in the book. Margo was different from Lindsay and we got to know one of Margo's friends, which wasn't present in the other book. However, Margo and Lindsay were both different from the main stream girls shown in both books.

If this was written from Margo's perspective I think I would have enjoyed it a bit more since it wouldn't have been similar to An Abundance of Katherine's. I know a lot of people will argue that fact that this book has a different plot line compared to the other, which I will acknowledge. It was different in that sense, but to me there were a lot of parallels. Especially the life changing experience both boys had gone through because of a girl.

So all in all, I'd give this a 6 out of 10 just because of all the parallels I saw.