Book: Looking for Alaska

Looking for Alaska

by John Green

Length: 221 pages

Format: Paperback
Price: Free - borrowed from a friend

How I heard about it: um...unless you're sleeping under a rock, you pretty much know who John Green is

Basic Premise: A young boy escapes his meaningless existence in Florida to attend boarding school in Alabama in search of "the great perhaps." While there, he encounters Alaska, a free-spirited goddess who both confuses and captures his heart.

My Take: 7 out of 10 (scale here)  

I needed a book like this at this point in the school year - it's over, I can breathe, and I can deal with something a bit more "mature"...even if it is immature high schoolers.  I really liked the book.  Alaska was a lot like whatever the girl's name is from Paper Towns, which is the first JG book I ever read.  I kind of hated the PT girl, but oddly, the Alaskan version of her in this book was likeable.  I liked Miles, too, for the most part.  I did NOT see the big event coming, which, in hindsight, was a pretty huge miss on my part.  The novel is divided into two sections: "before" and, you guessed it, "after."  Instead of chapters, it's divided into sections like "Eighty-one days before" or "the day after."  Somehow, I still missed it until the day before, and even then, I didn't quite believe it was real.  And then I, just like them, wanted to know who. what. when. where. why. how. Maybe one of the best accomplishments of an author is getting his reader to want something as much as the character.

As good as it was, I have two beefs with this book.  The first one is that there is no way on God's green earth I could ever give it to a student.  I REALLY hate that.  The second, related to the first, is that I hate the seemingly incessant conviction among the young in books like this that life is about sex and drinking.  I am always surprised at the depth of this belief and the lengths young people will go to get it.  Perhaps it is because the boys I surrounded myself with when I was this age were Ricks and Jeffs and Sams and Jacobs and Tylers - they were just so good.  They loved me and cared about me, not what I could do for them or get for them.  I avoided the boys like the ones in this book like the plague and pray to GOD that my daughter does the same.  Perhaps my boys were naive, or perhaps I am naive.  Whatever the reason, it always leaves a very sour taste in my mouth.