Paper Towns Book Summary

Paper Towns takes place in Orlando, Florida. The book begins in a neighborhood called Jefferson Park. The narrator, Quentin Jacobsen, also known as Q, and his neighbor Margo Roth Spiegelman, both young kids, are at a park and discover the body of Robert Joyner, a man who has committed suicide. After that the book flashes forward to Quentin and Margo as high schoolers who have grown apart. Randomly, in the middle of the night, Margo shows up at Quentin’s bedroom window dressed like a ninja, with black face paint and black clothes, to get out of her house without her parents seeing her. She convinces him to sneak out and help her seek revenge on people she feels have hurt her. The first characters they visit are Margo’s ex-boyfriend, Jase, and the girl he was cheating on Margo with, Becca. Quentin calls Becca's parents to inform them about their daughter being with Jase to get her and Jase

The next day at school all Q thinks about is how things have changed. After Margo has been missing for three days her parents file a report. After learning that Margo has run away, Q notices a poster of Woody Guthrie taped to the back of her blinds. The poster has a song circled called Walt Whitman's Niece, which then, leads him to a book of poems, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The poem has highlighted sections that he believes to be clues left by Margo to lead him to where she is. He continues to search for clues and finds a clue in the poem book, to lead him to an address scribbled on a small piece of paper located in his door jam. Hoping it will lead them to where she is hiding; Q and his friends skip school the following day and go to the place on the piece of paper. They find an old abandoned mini-mall which contains evidence that Margo was recently there, as well as a spray-painted message on the wall implying he should expect to find her