Looking for Alaska by John Green: a Review

“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
Looking for Alaska by John Green

If you have read my post on Paper Towns, you know how much I love John Green's books, and this is no exception.  Pudge, our narrator, is over his uneventful home life. So he enrolls in Culver Creek Boarding School in an attempt to seek "The Great Perhaps". There, life gets infinitely more exciting, crazy, and destructive, especially upon meeting Alaska Young (who is equally exciting, crazy, and destructive.) 




I love this book. It seems as though John Green's specialty is balancing humor with heartbreak. This book was written before Paper Towns, and also encourages people to imagine other people complexly. But also, nostalgia. Oh, the nostalgia.

While I would never want this to be my high school experience (for reasons which are obvious to those who have read this book), there are parts of this book that invite nostalgia for my own high school in overwhelming waves. And, I mean, I read this in highschool. 

Here, watch this video, then read the book, then watch the video again. It is... beautiful.

I gave a copy of this book to a friend of mine for his birthday. His initial reaction was, "Mary Jo, I didn't read Harry Potter because it was at a boarding school...". Luckily, he kept up with it. The boarding school element definitely lends itself to some crazy shenanigans (certain pranks come to mind) but mostly I think it is important to look at the relationships that form within this book. Whether romantic or platonic (on blurring the line between the two) the bonds are beautiful and tough and make me want to hug my friends and never let them go. 

I'd like to touch on more, but. There are some pretty heavy spoilers. So. In lieu of that, check out John Green's Q&A blog for those who have finished Looking for Alaska.