Review of 'Paper Towns' by John Greene

“She loved mysteries so much that she became one.”

‘Paper Towns’ is a coming-of age novel composed by John Greene, fundamentally for a stream of young adults, distributed on October 16, 2008, by Dutton books.

It falls under the genres of mystery, romance and comedy fiction, quite an unusual bunch, but however, is one of the highest selling books of all time. There also exists, a film based on the acclaimed novel titled ‘Paper Towns’ starring Nat Wolff and Cara Delevingne in lead roles, directed by Jake Schreier which released on 24th July, 2015.

Personally, I’d give it a four-star ranking because I truly believe the teen novel to be super entertaining and enticing. From a reader’s perspective, it’s hard to put down.

The plot commences with the setting, which happens to be in and around a fictional subdivision called “Jefferson Park”, based in rural Orlando, Florida. The tale centers around the storyteller and male protagonist of the story, Quentin “Q” Jacobsen, skinny, goofy and lanky, who has a bit of a teenage crush on his childhood friend and next-door neighbor, the mysterious and alluring, Margo Roth Spiegelman.

However, over time, as they grew older and as most classics go, Margo climbed the top of the social ladder and became the most popular girl in school, while ‘Q’ was left lagging at the bottom, and so was their friendship.

Things take an unprecedented turn, when one night, a few weeks before graduation, Margo suddenly appears at Quentin’s bedroom window, (a stunt she used to pull off as a kid) and ropes in a half-asleep Quentin for an all-nighter revenge plot targeting treacherous friends, cheating boyfriend and eighth grade bullies all throughout the neighborhood.

Towards the end of their trailblazing revenge campaign, Quentin and Margo break into SeaWorld just for a little adventure where she takes him to the highest point of a pinnacle in the city and ambiguously airs her views about the paper town underneath.

Be that as it may, the following day Margo disappears. Since the young lady had run away from home previously too, leaving questionable pieces of information and turning up in shocking spots, her family didn’t think much of it, while her high-school companions awaited her much anticipated come back with a considerably sensational story of her capers. It was just Quentin, who feared that she had taken off to end her life for the better, when he discovered clues left explicitly for him in featured sections of ‘Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.’

His desperate search for Margo drove him all through relinquished subdivisions, what she once aligned as ‘paper towns.’

Helping Q crack the code is Ben, who accomplishes a date with one of Margo’s popular friends, Lacey, also in search for her, in spite of his regularly misogynist comments, and Radar, a quieter and grounded classmate who helps Q uncover Margo’s clues she left him. Their clever, comical banter helps Quentin’s journey, and gives an outlook of friendship, companionship and love, to the impromptu search party and their road trip that they set upon, to find Margo.

The very reason why John Green wrote this novel was to bring to light the fact that many a times people choose to mis-envision a certain way they may see a person they have a romantic affliction for as being a perfect fantasy version of themselves, which is incorrect. People are people. People have various layers to their personalities and those personalities are dynamic. “What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person” Green says in the novel.

‘Paper Towns’ is more a book of thoughts than a book of characters and I trust that at the focal point, all things considered, lies Quentin’s ‘Quest’ for Margo Roth Spiegelman. Page after page is committed to solving the uber-complicated riddle of who Margo Roth Spiegelman truly is, as everybody has a different perception or opinion of her.

As I would see it, the best thing about this book was the exchange of character. As aforementioned, the book centers around each character’s distinctive thought of Margo, especially Quentin’s and in the end their acknowledgement that she was, alas only an individual like them, trying to figure out her true self.

Along the way, Quentin concludes that his search wasn’t only for Margo, the cool, attractive, most popular girl in school who everybody wanted to be friends with, however he was searching for the ‘real’ Margo, an enigma of a girl, a girl who was a mystery and who nobody really knew.

The plot of the story, is very well-written. The infamous trail of clues gives the book a main impetus, something that grips the reader to keep reading on. It adjusts the satire and the journal like stories with the riddle splendidly, by combining them. The two are indistinguishable, and combined, come together beautifully to make this novel a huge success.

Paper Towns has just about everything- humor, mystery, sentiment and ideas that numerous young adults will unquestionably identify with. Green always puts forth such intriguing, active characters and his composition style is so well considered, apt, and sometimes even idyllic that it doesn’t appear to be a silly romantic tale.

Something that John Green does with impeccability is his utilization of language, he knows precisely how to word things to make everything as credible as could be allowed. The discussions had in the book and the considerations his characters express bode well with the minds of his audience and that is the reason his books are so prominently appreciated and loved by both adolescents and grown-ups.

I’d definitely recommend reading this all-too gripping novel. It unquestionably, is one of the most spellbinding novels I’ve read in a long time.

Green does what he does best, and strikes the perfect blend of comedy, mystery and romance, thus bringing to an end, his very plausible tale.                                                    

Works Cited

1. Green, J. (2008). Paper Towns. Dutton Books.
2. Hidalgo, E. (2016). Becoming the Mysterious: John Green's Paper Towns. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 59(2), 147-155.
3. Lee, L. (2017). An Analysis of Characters in Paper Towns. International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, 3(2), 86-89.
4. Lyu, J. (2020). The Influence of Postmodernism on John Green's Paper Towns. Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, 440, 91-94.
5. Martin, D. (2015). How Accurate Is 'Paper Towns'? Here's What The Movie Got Right And Wrong. Bustle.
6. Maurya, R. (2019). Female Friendship and Masculinity in John Green's Paper Towns. Contemporary Discourse, 10(1), 67-74.
7. Meehan, C. (2017). Love in the Digital Age: An Analysis of John Green's Paper Towns. Journal of Popular Culture, 50(1), 76-91.
8. O'Neal, M. (2015). The Complicated Feminism of Paper Towns. The Atlantic.
9. Priyadarshini, S. (2016). Paper Towns: A Critical Analysis. Labyrinth, 6(1), 10-19.
10. Shuai, S. (2018). Analysis of the Riddle in John Green's Paper Towns. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 8(5), 504-510.