Paper Towns - John Green

Title: Paper Towns

Author: John Green

Publication information: Bloomsbury Publishing (2010)

When childhood crush, Margo Roth Spiegelman, turns up at Quentin's window late at night summoning to be part of her revenge plan, he follows. Soon when Margo disappears, he must solve the mystery and follow the clues left by her.

From the beginning, I found the plot very engaging despite it being quite slow to begin with. I think that although the premise is quite simple, I found myself hooked into the lives of these characters and I was just wanting to know how the whole mystery would be resolved. I really liked that some of the major revelations come from works of literature, which in some ways, even though I haven't read the works mentioned, give the novel more depth and make you want to read these connected texts too. 

The characters were amazing in this. I have read reviews of Paper Towns saying that John Green made Margo too perfect and I think that at first this is correct but I think that this is one of the major lessons of this book; Margo isn't perfect, that's just the way Quentin sees her to begin with. I think that this adds to Margo's character and all of the aspects of her personality really make her a rounded character. In some ways she reminds me of Alaska from Looking for Alaska because of her rebellious nature and the way she is idolised, but I think that the difference with Margo is that there were definite answers by the end of the book. Personally, I found Quentin to be a very endearing protagonist. As this is from first person perspective, I found it easy to empathise with him and I liked the way that he would do anything for his friends yet he was still an intelligent individual. The side characters also helped me to enjoy this novel. I really like Ben and his wittiness and arrogance. I also liked Radar and his back story as I found the black Santa collection quite funny.

The writing, as ever with John Green, was witty, intelligent and humourous, with a dash of seriousness, which kept me hooked. The pacing was really good and I felt that Part 3 with the road trip was especially fast paced but this fit the plot perfectly.

Overall, I would give Paper Towns by John Green 5 out of 5 stars as I really can't fault any of it. I loved the characters and the writing style and the plot was really captivating.