Paper Towns

Paper Towns by John GreenA paper town is a fictional town that mapmakers place on thier maps to prevent copyright infringement. If the paper town shows up on another map, the original makers know it is an illegal copy of their map.This novel uses paper towns in a set of clues that Margo Roth Speigelman leaves for her neighbour, Quentin Jacobsen on the day she disappears. Margo disappears the morning after she ropes Quentin into her plans for revenge on a group of friends who have betrayed her. Quentin goes along with the pranks as he is just glad to be part of Margo’s life again, having been smitten with her since their childhood.Margo’s disappearance leaves questions for Quentin, and to some extent, their classmates.As the teens follow the clues, and varying interpretations of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,  to find Margo, they are making assumptions about who she was, each of them seeing her in a different way, each having had a different relationship with her. The story is told mostly from inside Quentin’s head, as he is the most obsessive of Margo and her disappearance. It becomes an all encompassing quest for him to locate this girl he holds on a pedestal.  Such is his desire to locate the Margo he thinks he knows, that he makes some un-Quentin like decisions to accomplish this, showing the story is more about Quentin finding himself, than him finding Margo.I found the ending somewhat disappointing, a let down after all the hype about finding this mysterious girl, but still a good story, in which you are cheering the characters on.More teen fiction by John Green includes: The Fault in our Stars, Looking for Alaska, and An Abundance of Katherines.