Paper Towns

717 Words2 Pages

“If people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricane.” This quote from John Green's Looking for Alaska perfectly describes the relationship between the main characters in Paper Towns. After spending many years loving his childhood friend and neighbor Margo, Q realizes that she isn’t who he thought she was. On an intense hunt to find Margo and her truth, Q learns that people aren't fake and fragile like paper. Stimulating and relatable messages, wonderfully free-spirited characters, and an intensely deep and intriguing plot makes John Green's Paper Towns a thought-provoking, wild, and moving novel about the complexity and perception of humans.
Green's characters spend their lives a bit lost and misunderstood, but through hardships, their intertwined souls learn realistic and crucial lessons. Q realizes that people aren't made of paper, having more than one dimension. His love, Margo, may seem fake and fragile, but she's only a layered, complicated girl who hid herself. Many (especially teens and young adults) can relate to this. People can always have different personas and attitudes. In Margo's case, she hid herself hence she was misunderstood and called a “paper girl”. Also, we are only human, therefore how we perceive people is not always accurate and/or how they want to be seen. On page 185, Q realizes how wrong everyone was: “'. . . I thought of my Margo, and Lacey’s Margo, and Mrs. Spiegelman’s Margo, and all of us looking at her reflection in different fun house mirrors.”. This quote shows everyone has been misjudging Margo; each seeing a different, distorted reflection. No one even knows how she wanted to be seen. Then on page 266 during the road trip, ...

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...way to Agloe, a paper town and Q is determined to find her at all costs. It's later shown that Margo disappeared to reveal her true soul to everyone, but Q is torn as the girl he loves tugs at the strings in his heart, whether they're next door or a thousand miles apart. The intriguing plot will have you turning the pages and grabbing tissues for more suspense, mysteries, twists and turns.
In the upshot of it all, John Green's Paper Towns is a great and touching novel about the relatable life story with captivating characters, meaningful texts, and a wild, suspenseful plot that gracefully displays our complexity and perception of life and humans. After reading Paper Towns, you may look at your world in a different light and realize people are not how we idealized them to be. This fascinating novel is a must-read for people of all ages!

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