Review - Paper Towns by John Green

Published by Bloomsbury
Published 3 May 2010

Summary from Goodreads - When Margo Roth Spiegelman beckons Quentin Jacobsen in the middle of the night—dressed like a ninja and plotting an ingenious campaign of revenge—he follows her. Margo’s always planned extravagantly, and, until now, she’s always planned solo. After a lifetime of loving Margo from afar, things are finally looking up for Q . . . until day breaks and she has vanished. Always an enigma, Margo has now become a mystery. But there are clues. And they’re for Q.

For a book that starts of so quitely and unassuming, I never really expected to literally be in awe of it's conclusion nor of the events that lead upto it's finish.  Your drawn in from the first page by Quentin, whose voice is firmly established within the opening chapter and his attraction to a strange, alluring and enigmatic girl, who only happens to be in the first few chapters.  Yes, i'm talking about Margo Roth Spiegelman.  Q is dragged into her world either by choice or the desperate need to understand someone he desperately wants to understand.  They go round Orlando, doing magnificently crazy things like breaking and entering, though not simultaneously I may add.  But just when Q thinks he's on a path to discover the mystery that is Margo Roth Spiegelman, she disappears, seemingly leaving clues behind for him to decipher.  Q becomes convinced that if he can crack the code Margo left behind, the clues will lead him to her.  

I don't actually know if my reactions and thoughts about this can even be articulated into coherant sentences, because this book is not just the simple mystery that the plot line sells you.  It's a story about discovering yourself, discovering the people around you, it's full of life lessons and downfalls and the things we tell ourselves that no one else ever gets to hear.  Personally, I found Q's journey to be quite philosophical, full of why's and how's and what if's.  It was such an exhilirating feeling to read a book that actually kept me on my toes from page to page, and not just trying to figure out the plot line or character traits, but more the actual characters themselves.  Who were they? and more importantly, what their story was trying to tell me?

The whole "Paper Town" aspect really fascinated me, that map makers actually put fake towns onto maps to prevent other companies violating copyright law.  I think this was such a clever way of inserting copyright without it be noticeable.  But then this made me think, who's more clever, the people who saw this fake town on a map and made it into something real, who manifested a town out of someones weird idea to trick people into violating the law, or the people who were trying to be covert and ended up getting burned by some person building a town from nothing?  SEE? it made me really think.

I loved that even though Margo was only an "actual" character in the first section of the book, I wanted to reveal the mystery surrounding her, I wanted to find out who she was and why she did what she did.  I cared about her and her whacked out way of thinking, I wanted to find her just as much as Q did (though I was not harbouring any unrequited love for the girl).  The way Q built Margo up in his head to be this unattainable, never to be reached, fantastical being, made me think about how I view other people.  Sometimes people do things that really piss me off, they make me frustrated, they make me want to smack them right in their stupid faces.  But then, maybe I invoke this emotion in people, sometimes maybe i'm not the person other people want me to be, or expect me to be.  The version of me people have in their head is not the actual me, only I can know the actual me.  Maybe i'm just a paper girl living in a paper town, maybe we all are.  Or maybe we're not afraid to be who we are and we can embrace it and move forward.

All in all, I kind of want to beat the complete shit out of past me for not reading this book sooner, and in the next minute, i'm glad that I didn't.  I'm glad i've got the feeling of just having read a book that made me laugh, a book that was hysterical and poignant and ultimately a book that I could read time and time again and take something different and new from each time. I'm absolutely, completely, awestruck.  And I think I can say with total conviction, John Green, is my favourite writer hands down.  Nobody else comes close.  

p.s word to the wise and basically just some awesome advice - if your ever stuck when buying a gift, I would most definitely say, in all situations, a Black Santa would suffice.