Paper Towns by John Green
Hi, I am Sarah. I am fourteen years old and an avid reader; it is one of my favorite things to do. Inspired by authors’ creations of magnificent places and surprising havens built by simple letters, I aspire to be an author and, meanwhile, nurture the love to write.
Quentin “Q” Jacobsen figures that everyone gets a miracle. If you consider all of the unlikely possibilities, it’s not much of a stretch to suppose that at least one should happen to every person. But Q’s miracle is not winning a Nobel Prize or surviving a lightning strike. His miracle is living next to Margo Roth Spiegelman.
Q is comfortable watching Margo from afar – until the night she crawls into his bedroom at midnight, recruiting him as a getaway driver in an elaborate, eleven-part plot of revenge. When the day breaks and Q returns to high school, Margo has disappeared – and apparently left behind a trail of clues for him to follow.
Written with incredible attention to detail, Quentin looks for Margo, and the more he finds, the less he sees of the girl he thought he knew. Just when it seems that the trail has gone cold, another thread appears, weaving a net of paths she could have disappeared to, to get away from the picture-perfect town that they live in.
John Green probes the foundation of what life is like today: every day lived for the next. For Quentin, it has all been simple: the monotonous routine, the pleasant identical-ness. For Margo, it has been all about having more, knowing more, being more than just a paper girl in a paper town. Through a winding mystery, each finds parts of the other than neither of them knew before, a path to discovery that’s ultimately very human.
