Paper Towns follows the typical John Green formula of a quirky and intelligent main character with lewd sidekicks and an unattainable girl and also has the same type of characterizations as Looking for Alaska e.g. Quentin/Miles, Alaska/Margo, but I couldn't care less. Green creates nerdy and quirky characters that embrace their nerdiness and doesn't apologize for it. Green also has a unique writing style that's nerdy and quirky and that I thoroughly enjoy reading.
Paper Towns starts off with a really cool concept. The main character, Quentin is assigned by Margo, his neighbour and crush, to help her take revenge on many people one night and the next day she disappears. She has left clues and now it is up to Quentin to find her. However this whole concept did fail me.
This story revolves around finding Margo. Firstly, I couldn't understand the relationship between Margo and Quentin. They were friends as kids, but I didn't get to see this friendly relationship or Quentin's crush towards her develop. Secondly, I found it unlikely that Quentin would help someone do something that they don't really know about for someone that they haven't spoken to in 8-9 years. Lastly, I didn't like Margo as a character. She was too much of a mystery and reminded too much of Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby (don't ask me why, but she did) and I don't like Daisy.
"Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl." (Quentin Jacobsen)
I also did not enjoy the way this book ended, but this issue is more of a personal one. I do like all the loose ribbons to be wrapped up into a neat little tiny box called THE END. I do understand that endings need to be realistic and I appreciate and respect all books that do that, but I'm a sucker for happy endings. I read books to escape from reality and for things to go right in fictional worlds. This is why the ending just didn't work for me.
Paper Towns might have started off being a light-hearted, silly, laugh-out-loud book with mostly likable characters (Margo is not one of them), but the shallow waters becomes a deep ocean. I didn't realise how much of depth this book had, until I closed it and pondered over it. This book takes what I thought about characters and people, what the main character in the story thinks about others and reveals in tiny bits and pieces that what we see from the outside and what we think isn't who that person really is.
"What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person." (Quentin Jacobsen)
I wasn't sure whether I wanted to read Paper Towns, but I'm so glad that I did. This is definitely my favourite John Green book!