Paper Towns, by John Green

I finished reading this incredible book quite a while ago now but for some reason or another I forgot to blog about it which is odd because I really, really enjoyed it. Paper Towns is a YA novel which follows the nerdy, confident and wonderfully opinionated Quentin in his at first seemingly impossibly task of tracking down the mysterious and beautiful Margo Roth Spiegelman who left him hanging after sweeping him away on an exhilarating and hilarious all-nighter.

It kind of takes my breathe away how beautifully John Green blends the funny, meaningful and suspenseful together without ever straying from a realistic and consistent plot line. In fact, Paper Towns is exactly what a young adult novel should be; it's reflective, thoughtful, entertaining, relatable and intelligent. It's also really witty and unique and the characters are all wonderful developed and, in the case of Q's friends, just as annoying, quirky and persistent as friends often are in real life. I love how none of Q's peers were portrayed as the clique- type "perfect friend" who is always  selfless considerate and "there for you". A theme that runs subtlety through the book is acceptance and more precisely acceptance of people's flaws, hang ups and overall imperfectness. I think this is something very interesting for a YA novel to explore as, let's face it, all teenagers are fairly annoying!

Anyway, I definitely recommend Paper Towns to you, even if you're not a young adult as it's an insightful, entertaining read which everyone can enjoy. One thing I have noticed about John Green's books is that they are never as you would expect; they are always better than anticipated. They always hugely exceed my expectations to an almost crazy extent. In my mind there's two catogories of YA books; regular YA books and John Green's YA books as John Green takes this genre to a whole new level and it is absolutely mind blowing how much "awesome" is contained in his books.

I'll leave you with one non spoiling quote from Paper Towns:
"What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person" 




p.s. It's such a beautiful sunny day in England today. Would it be really cheesy of me to say that the evening is golden? It really is lovely. Spring is finally on its way!