Paper Towns - John Green

It is a truth universally acknowledged that John Green is one of the best authors in the world. He has written some pretty marvelous pieces of litterature, amongst which stands one of my favourite books ever, The Fault in Our Stars, and Paper Towns was just further proof that he can write beautifully, thoughtfully and that he can create some breathtaking characters. Now, don't go believing that I prefer it to TFiOS, because TFiOS just can't be surpassed, but Paper Towns was a truly wonderful book and I would recommend it to anyone and everyone out there. It was a great, interesting read.
I'll give a short summary and then discuss some of the characters.
So, the book is told through Q's (Quentin Jacobsen) perspective. He likes his next door neighbour, Margo Roth Spiegelman, but they stopped being close after they found the body of a man who had killed himself in the park near their home. Q is the type of person who doesn't have too many friends but isn't lonely and is slightly geeky without being bullied about it: he's a very normal person. One night, Margo comes into his room and makes him play pranks on a bunch of people -if they can really be called pranks. The next day, she's gone. The rest of the book follows Q's search for Margo.
I really liked Q and the way he kind of overanalyzed everything and everyone around him. His interaction with this idea he has of Margo is truly charming and I liked getting to be in his head for the length of the book: his thought process is really different from mine, and he's really smart, so it's refreshing to read from his POV.
Then we have Margo, who only truly appears in the book for a short period of time: most of the book is spent simply following her trail and thus interacting with her, but she's not there in physical form, so to speak. We do get to know a lot about her, though. Margo is a really interesting character: she is unlike anyone I've ever known, and her interactions with all of the other characters are very peculiar, and fun to read about. I really liked the first part of the book, the night when she and Q just go around Orlando, all of the pranks. We kind of got an idea of what Margo is like, but it was really hard to form a coherent idea of her personnality. She is a very puzzling character in that sense, and I really appreciated reading about her and finding out things about her through the clues she left for Q.
Finally we have Ben and Radar, who are simply awesome. They're both so funny and John Green did perfectly with these two, because they added humor to the story, balancing with all of the slightly dramatic things that are going on around them. Once again, he proved that he has the best sense of humor and I found some of the things that Ben and Radar said, or even things that happened to them, or were a part of their storyline, their background, to be truly hilarious (like the whole black santa collection thing with Radar's parents).
Overall, I really loved this book, the storyline, the progression. It was a very fun, interesting and unusual book, and I greatly appreciated reading it. I'd rate it a 10/10 and would recommend to everyone, but mostly to people who read and loved TFiOS.
That's it for today,
Toodlepip,
x Clara