Eoin, Endlessly Slipping, 2013
(February 19)
I wanted to read Paper Towns because I enjoyed The Fault in Our Stars so much. This seemed slow at first, perhaps because TFiOS was so great and started off so grippingly right from the beginning, and I was maybe worried that this was going to fall A LOT short if it didn't get right down to business.I also gave it a little side-eye at first because it felt like Green was doing a Manic Pixie Dream Girl story, but then it got very good with a well-done plot point and the story became quite suspenseful. At that point it seemed superior to TFiOS.
It features many, many interesting literary allusions and tropes and many profound insights into how we see and don't see ourselves and each other, and I enjoyed all this very much. Like TFiOS, Paper Towns somehow interweaves literary / philosophical references with down-in-the-dirt teenage crudeness, creating a nice combo of comic lows and lofty, intellectual highs.
The resolution, though? :/ I thought it kind of undermined the suspense that was so beautifully built… and it got too mushy right at the end -- this causes it to lose some power.
So I'm reading along like this… just loving Paper Towns and thinking I'm going to give it 3.5 stars… and then I read some online reviews, to see if anyone else was disappointed like I was by the ending… and I get lost in the vortex of the_whittler’s trenchant observations… and I begin to hate John Green and both his books…
Never experienced such a 180 about a book in my life.
