John Green Case

I've finished reading Paper Towns by John Green two weeks or so ago (thanks to PB's recommendation) and just now had time to write a journal entry about it. I read Looking for Alaska, another book by John Green before that and I learned that reading novels by the same author consecutively isn't really a good idea. I should've learned that already after my Nicholas Sparks' novel marathon back in high school. The style and the plot was kind of similar and it kind of bored me after a bit and I ended up taking two nights to finish the book.

Paper Town's protagonist and narrator is Quentin "Q" Jacobsen. The story started when Q and Margo Roth Spiegelman, his neighbor were nine and discovered the corpse of Robert Joyner hanging from a tree. I could only imagine the horror they must've felt upon seeing a dead man who committed suicide. The novel then flashes forward a few years, when Q and Margo are seniors at their high school. Q and Margo grew apart over the years and Q developed a huge crush for Margo Roth Spiegelman.

One night, Margo shows up in Q's bedroom window and convinces him to help her get revenge on the people who hurt her. Her ex-boyfriend, Jase, who she caught cheating on her with her best friend, Becca. Then Lacey, also Margo's friend. Margo felt like Lacey have never been a real friend to her and she felt like she is ridiculing and insulting her. They also visited Karin, the girl who informed Margo that Jase was cheating on her.

After Margo's revenge, they went to a building and Margo described their town, Orlando, as a paper town. Paper towns are basically fake towns. They are usually copyright trap towns or unbuilt subdivisions that exist only in maps. Margo also said that everything is much uglier close up.

"Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those culs-de-sac, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters." - Margo Roth Spiegelman

The next day, Margo didn't show up at school. Everyone was used to Margo not showing up at school that no one really became worried (she ran away five times already). But when she's been missing for about three days already, Q started to get worried and tried