Review Detail

Colin Singleton has just been dumped by his 19th Katherine. The day of graduation Katherine XIX (who, incedentially, was also Katherine I) Decided that it just wasn't working out. In an attempt to clean up the pathetic mess she left behind, Colin's best friend drags him on a road trip which leads them to stumble into the small not-quite-town of Gutshot where they find work, friends, and a whole summer of strange situations and non-Katherine related romance.

This book was good but not as fantastic as Paper Towns (also by John Green) The writing was incredubly clever and fun, and the foot notes at the bottom of the pages were full of random, hilarious facts. I read somewhere that this was a "fluff book". Just a cute story with no real purpose and this is completely untrue. Anybody who reads this without getting something out of this wasn't reading it seriously.

Colin was raised as a child prodigy. His whole lifes goal is to leave his mark on the world by mattering. He knows that he's too socially awkward to matter to any one person, but if he can just work out a perfect, original theorum he knows he'll matter to the world as a whole and won't need that one special person. In Gutshot, he meets Lindsey. All she wants to do is live out her life in the obsurity of Gutshot's greesy burger joint and town convinience store. If she can just matter to the few special people of her town, then the world doesn't matter. Together they discover that life isn't about mattering. It's about taking the opportunities you get and riding forward in life full throttle. The ending of this book embodied that with perfect poigniency.

I'm more than half way through Looking for Alaska and I'm thoroughly convinced that John Green is one of the most brilliant writers I have ever come across. His writing is so real, so gritty and cynical that his books are an almost perfectly mirrored reflection of life. And then he zooms in really close on one specific aspect and slowly draws our attention to it through his writing so that we're left staring at the last few words on the final page breathless, wondering why we've never looked at life that way before. Read. John. Green.

I'll leave you with a quote;

"Colin Singleton's distance from his glasses made him realize the problem; Myopia. He was nearsighted. The future lay before him, inevitable but invisable.