Bloomsbury Paper Towns

I ordered this for my daughter, but read it first and decided it was not okay for her to read. The main characters are teenage boys who say disturbing and disgusting things often. If the author had left out those gross comments, it could have been an enjoyable book.

I am in a complete John Green bubble at the moment after the release of The Fault in Our Stars trailer all I want to do is watch his vlogs and read his books and cry over them. I was a bit apprehensive about Paper Towns at first because The Fault in Our Stars was so incredibly emotional I didn’t want to be let down by his other books not moving me as much as that one did. But then I figured there’s no point comparing his books to each other because they’re all different and although Paper Towns isn’t sad, it still demonstrates John Green’s outstanding abilities to capture and connect with the thoughts of his young readers. He is a literary genius and can open up the minds of young adults (and older adults alike) into the most bizarre and beautiful of worlds and gets you thinking and contemplating things you’d never even thought of before. Paper Towns is about a boy called Quentin, Q for short, who is in love with his classmate and neighbour, Margo. She turns up at his window one night and takes him on a all-night road trip where she gets revenge on her classmates. The next day she doesn’t turn up for school but with a history of running away out of the blue this seems fairly normal. Until Q starts finding clues she’s left for him and sets out to try and find her. After being led into abandoned buildings and down dead ends, he finally gets one solid lead on where she might be so along with 3 friends they embark on a 2 day road-trip where they find out a lot about themselves and each other but the main question is, will they find Margo?I loved the storyline and the normality of it all at first. Just a boy who’s in love with a girl, a couple of goofy best friends and the general banter boys that age have but then John leads us down a completely different path of both normal and abnormal. The book was structured in 3 parts; Part 1: The Strings. Which occurred before Margo went missing. This is the chapter where she takes Q on the all-night road trip and where you learn a lot about Margo. Part 2: The Grass. This is where she’s gone missing and when Q and his friends have found the clues she left. The final part is called The Vessel and this section is set out in hours e.g. hour 1, hour 2 and this is the final part of their journey. It was an unusual set-up but I loved it and each section focuses on a different theme and you see Q change throughout. Q was a great main character. He was dorky and sweet and the kind of boy you’d want to be friends with. I found myself picturing Logan Lerman in my head as Q because I felt he had some of the same traits as Charlie from The Perks of Being a Wallflower but he was a lot more sociable and confident. Margo was such a dominant character but she wasn’t even physically present in about 75% of the book. I loved that even though she wasn’t there, the whole story and everything in it revolved around her.John Green really gets it down to a T, the way in which some young people think and talk, their dreams and desires and the way they see the world. John’s work has been criticised for the way in which the young characters in his books think isn’t realistic and they don’t actually think these things but they do, because I do and although not all young people may feel the same and may not think the same I completely understand Q’s thought process, John’s narrative and Margo’s need and desire to run away. I absolutely loved the whole, ‘paper towns’ idea but when you really think about it, it’s absolutely right. It definitely varies throughout the book but the literal meaning of a paper town is when mapmakers will insert fake places (called paper towns) onto their maps to make sure no one is copying their maps but it’s the thought of creating something that other people want to make real, which resembles Margo and Qs perception of Margo in the book. This book very much relies on hidden meanings but when you get to the bottom of those meanings, it’s beautiful. I always find it so difficult to review John Green’s books and worry that I’m not doing them the justice they deserve but this book was outstanding. I truly could not put it down and the whole idea, the characters, the story was perfect in every way possible. It was full of memorable and relatable quotes and John really makes you look at things completely differently. He is slowly becoming one of my upmost favourite authors and I could read and live in the stories he creates forever.Find all my reviews here:[...]

This is the first novel by John Green that I've read (I know, I'm a little behind the trend but oh well) and I am definitely planning on reading some more of his work.I was initially attracted to the beautiful cover art of this novel. I'm a sucker for a good cover and this one really caught my eye. Plus, I fancied an indulgent Young Adult novel, something that would suck me in and keep me absorbed. This was exactly what I wanted.Quentin "Q" Jacobsen is mere weeks away from graduating High School. He's got a place at a decent College lined up and his life seems to be on-track, well as much as it can be when you're eighteen years old and trying desperately to avoid the horrors of your High School Prom. And then one night, the mysterious and beautiful Margo Roth Spiegelman, the next door neighbour he's loved since he was a child, waltzes in through his bedroom window and whisks him off on a tour of the neighbourhood to complete a series of pranks she has lined up for her cheating boyfriend and his entourage.And then, just like that, Margo is gone. She doesn't turn up for school the next day or the day after that. There is no note, no phone call, no explanation whatsoever. Margo has simply vanished, leaving a trail of mystery behind her. Knowing that on previous escapes from her suburban life, Margo has left clues as to her whereabouts (the letters M, S, P, and I left uneaten in a bowl of Alphabet Soup), Q and his friends begin a search of Margo's life for any possible clues.But when it comes down to it, did Margo really want to be found? Did she really expect Q to find her? And just who is Margo anyway? As he creeps around her life, following the paper trail that Margo has left for him, Q begins to doubt that he ever knew the real Margo, the Margo she is inside her heart. And as he gets closer to finding her, he must reconcile the two version of Margo Roth Spiegelman and what they mean to him.This was a beautiful, deep read. Once again, and I know it's a theme with the Young Adult titles I'm reading lately, I really wish this novel had been around when I was a teenager myself. The characters are exquisite, especially Margo, who is secretly the girl I wanted to be at eighteen and failed. And the idea of paper towns is cleverly worked into the plot and imbued with such subtle meaning (I don't want to go into detail on what paper towns are because it's a crucial plot point and I hate spoilers!). I adored this book and want to re-read it, want to see if there are any little details I missed, or cleverly inserted foreshadowing that would be identified only on a second read.If you like a cute little mystery and 3D characters that will stay in your mind, then check this out. You won't be disappointed.

I absolutely adored this book! I am a fan of John Green books as he never failed to disappoint me. This book is filled with the ups and downs of friendship, infatuation, comradeship and an overall sense of 'adventure'. When I read this book, I read it for hours non-stop, and when I finished it -while I sad that the journey was over- I was filled with an overwhelming sense of contentedness. This book shows us how everything these days seems to be artificial, and how a teenager- like Margo or Quentin- can see the world in such a light that shows them everything good and bad. This story exposes you to life and death and the circle of life and how we are all connected. I highly reccommend this book, as it is a great story- especially for rainy days or lazy mornings- filled with love, hate, adventure, infatuation, the typical teenage life, mischeviousness, the question about life and death, and how easily someone can be broken.I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did.

As with John Green's other book, I found this an enjoyable read.While I did not find Q relatable on a personal level, I could see how he might be to many teenagers.I found Q's obsession with Margo to be particularly interesting as it mirrors the way that people, teenagers in particular, put the people they like on pedestals. I would have liked the novel to put a bit more emphasis on the fact that this behaviour is unhealthy.The themes, pacing and writing style made for an extremely enjoyable read. The road trip was my favourite part.

After reading many other of john greens books I decided to give this one a try. It started off good, it was really funny and realistic. But after margo leaves it just went very downhill in my opinion. I read on purely through curiosity of where she went and why, not because I was still enjoying the book. It dragged on for ages. Also the clues that Margo left, in my opinion, in reality no one would of figured that out and it was unrealistic. Then when they went on the long car journey, it started to get more enjoyable and funny again so I was optimistic that the ending would be good. *SPOILER ALERT. But when they then went and found her,* I feel like it was a short and quick ending that could of ended much better than it did. It didn't really explain anymore than we already knew about why she left. And after all that time of the main character claiming to be absolutely in love with her *SPOILER ALERT, he then just decided that actually he didn't know her at all and so they just went their separate ways.* If the book wasn't often funny and addictive to know where she went then I would of definitely quit it. Quite disappointed as I love all the other john green books.