Ummm...★★★★1/2
So, for those of you who read my book review on An Abundance of Katherines (in My Pants), screw it. That book is good, but this book isgreat. (Following Meena's lead, the spoilers will be in white, so you'll have to highlight to get the story.)
I can now proudly say that I have read all of John Green's books. So far. He's coming out with another one. This time with a female protagonist. And a desert island. And a boy. And...I'm going to stop talking about that now and actually write the review of this book. "Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia," after all.
This is John Green's first book. The one that earned him critical acclaim and a heck of a lot of fans. And after reading it, I understand why. The book starts off like a seemingly typical High School Novel. There's a kid who's new to boarding school, and he makes friends with this group of students who are troublemakers but are basically nice people. And there is, in that group, a cleverfunnygorgeous girl who has a penchant for pranks, smoking, drinking, and poetry. Mayhem ensues, and Miles, the main character, becomes more and more infatuated with this cleverfunnygorgeous girl, and she seems to flirt back a bit, despite the fact that she has, as she is constantly reminding him, a boyfriend.
You think you know where this is going. After a bunch of mayhem and pranks and drinking together and sharing each other's life stories, they hook up and everything is happilyeveraftertheend. Right?
Right?
Wrong. If you were paying close attention from the beginning of the book, you noticed the chapters. They're counting down.
One hundred thirty-six days before.
Sixty-seven days before.
Eight days before.
The last day.
You reach that day in the middle of the book. Alaska, the cleverfunnygorgeous girl, wakes early that morning, yelling that "she forgot," then drives off and crashes her car. She is killed instantly. Every page after that is marked as just a day after the event.
The day after.
Twenty-eight days after.
Sixty-two days later.
One hundred thirty-six days after.
Most books just spend the rest of the story telling you about how people were sad, but then they moved on with life and realized that life is beautiful, and get all touchyfeelysentimental. This one...talks about the most EPIC. PRANK. EVER. So brilliant that it could only have been devised by said cleverfunnygorgeous girl. And yes, it is about discovering yourself after someone important passes away, but it does so without being over-the-top.
The reason that this book lost half a star is because a) no book is perfect, b) John Green does have a few stylistic points he could work on in this book, such as c) his dearth of funny, quotable lines, but come on it's d) his first published novel.
One of the real joys, though, is to see how much of himself John Green put's into the book. For example, the book's most famous quote,"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia," is something that his wife, Sarah Urist Green, actually said to him on their first date. Furthermore, the prank that the gang pulls near the end is actually a prank that John Green pulled with his class when he went to high school. For that video, click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lht_JH2xi6w. John puts so much of his life into his novels, and it's all the more fun to read them when you can spot the references.
That's all for now! PDBAZ and DFTBA!
~Taara
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