I bought Paper Towns by John Green because I’m mildly obsessed with him and I loved The Fault in Our Stars. I very unfairly thought I’d be a little disappointed by Paper Towns because I was aware of my high expectations, but I was wrong. It’s fantastic. The Fault in Our Stars is about losing someone you love totally unfairly to cancer. Paper Towns is about losing someone you love out of the blue, not knowing what happened to her, and slowly figuring out that you really didn’t know her in the first place.
The plot of Paper Towns is just plain surprising– several times I found myself looking at the side of the book with my finger marking my current page, thinking about where I was in the story and how far I had to go, and trying to guess what would happen based on how many pages were left. I think all of my guesses were wrong. This book reads like a mystery, and I was glued to it. Even when I wasn’t reading, I was wondering where Margo went and if she was okay.
Our main character and narrator is Quintin, a nearly-graduated high schooler who hangs out with band geeks, is picked on by bullies, and semi-idolizes the popular kids. (John Green writes well for dweebs, which I find endearing.) The queen of the popular kids is Margo, Quintin’s lifelong next-door neighbor, for whom he hopelessly pines. Quintin’s love for Margo is quite MPDGesque– he usually refers to her by her full name, “Margo Roth Spiegelman,” reverently, as if one name could not encapsulate the superior creature she is. Margo is beautiful, independent, and a little morbid, somewhat mysterious, and has a wild, cool, rebellious, fuck-it attitude that everybody seems to admire and envy.
One night Margo reaches across the social chasm and shows up at Quintin’s window. She takes him along for one of her crazy, dangerous adventures, and naturally Quintin sort of thinks his life is changing. Imagine: the cool, popular, gorgeous girl who seems utterly inaccessible spontaneously spends and entire night with you, doing things exciting and illegal and profound and romantic.
And the next day? She’s gone.
This leaves the school social structure in disarray and Quintin to figure out what to do next with the help of the supporting cast: Lacey, who is Margo’s friend and a reformed cool kid; Radar, who is obsessed with a fictionalized version of Wikipedia; and Ben, who is obsessed with girls (especially Lacey). Quintin’s friends have their vices, but of course so does Quintin: he’s obsessed with finding Margo.
Quintin and his friends follow clues– some left by Margo, some not, some strong leads, some shots in the dark– to try and find her. In the pursuit and investigation of clues, Quintin discovers a lot he didn’t know about Margo. Like that she never let her friends into her room, maybe because they might see her collections of vinyl and poetry. Or that she was part of a club that broke into abandoned buildings, and the other “urban explorers” suspected she was depressed. Everyone in the story has an idea about the “real” Margo Roth Spiegelman– her parents, her friends, the cool kids, the dweebs, her fellow abandoned building enthusiasts– and all the ideas are different. And, Quintin decides as he retroactively gets to know his neighbor, incomplete.
Thus Paper Towns addresses the problems with Manic Pixie Dream Girls. First, that no one really fits the bill, because no one is actually so super special and magical that he or she ceases to be a complete, complex, imperfect person. Second, that “it hurts both the observer and the observed”– Margo’s dream girl status distances her from other people, which is bad for her as well as those who care about her. Interestingly, Green doesn’t put all the blame for MPDGs on the shoulders of idealistic teenage boys. Margo must take some responsibility for the image of herself that she promoted: as Quintin says, “The fundamental mistake I had always made– and that she had, in fairness, led me to make– was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”
To say much more about the plot would spoil it. This review and others might make Paper Towns seem introspective and slow, but act three has plenty of action. I recommend it! And not just because I heart John Green.