Review: Paper Towns by John Green

In this review I'm sharing my thoughts on Paper Towns. These opinions are my own and just opinions. I'm not telling people what to like.

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs into his life—dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge—he follows. After their all-nighter ends, and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues—and they're for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he knew...

I buddy read this book with my friend Jasmijn! She gave it the same amount of stars.

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”

Rating: ☆ (1)

The Fault in our Stars was the first YA book I read. It basically was my introduction to the Young Adult "genre". I was a twelve-year-old in a reading slump, because the transition from elementary school to high school was quite tough for me.

You can understand that my expectations for this book was very high. However, these expectations lowered immensely after I watched the Paper Towns movie.

I held on to the thought: books are better than their adaptation.

It wasn't.

“The town was paper, but the memories were not.”

This book is one of the most disappointing books I've read.

The characters were annoying (especially Ben), the pace of the story was incredibly slow and the book was anticlimactic. Well... I guess you can't really call a book anticlimactic when I have never (not for a moment) thought the book was good to begin with.

It's a 300 page book, which isn't that thick, but I think it took me twice as long as it would take me to finish a good 300 page book. (With that I mean, a good book in my opinion.)

This book has so many raving reviews, but for me this was not it. I usually don't DNF books, because I keep having hope that they'll become better, but I think I should've just DNF'ed this book halfway through. Instead of DNF'ing, I just skipped a bunch of pages, because it was so boring and irrelevant.

I personally wouldn't recommend this book. Maybe twelve-year-old me would've liked it, but I kinda doubt it. I think John Green isn't for me anymore.

The Fault in our Stars was such a good story, but now I wonder if it has the same effect when I read it now.

I'm sad that this is the review I'm writing. I really hoped I would end up loving the book and be reminded of why I loved John Green's work back when I just started high school.

“Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.”

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