Looking for Alaska Review

Book Review #8: Looking for Alaska by John Green

Overall Rating: 8.8/10

Plot: 7.5/10

Characters: 8.5/10

Writing: 9.5/10

Originality: 10/10

Sample Passage: Just like that.  From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase.  But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating.  So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricane.

Genre: Teenager Realistic Fiction
Ages: 16 and up

Number of Pages: 221 | Hardcover Edition
Published: By Dutton Books, a member of the Penguin Group, in 2005

Summary: Miles is an average teenager with an average life that is definitely not to his liking. When he leaves for boarding school, it’s for a purpose: to seek what poet Francois Rabelais said he would seek in his famous last words: “I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”  But does the Great Perhaps really involve the pranks, booze, sex, and cigarettes Miles’ new friends introduce him to? With Alaska, the Colonel, and others’ help, Miles might just find the meaning of life, the Great Perhaps, that he is looking for. 

Review: When I picked up this book, it really didn’t look appealing at all. I mean, who wants to read a book about teenagers acting stupid? The only reason I really started to read it in the first place was, yes, because it was written by John Green, the author of the fantastic book The Fault In Our Stars. And because that book was SO fantastic, I had extremely high expectations going into this book. 

Unfortunately, my expectations were not quite met.  Although I have to give John Green a break, this was his first novel.  I just didn’t have the WOW factor like I did with the Fault In Our Stars. And even if I hadn’t read his newest, fantastic novel, I most likely would have still been disappointed by this book.

This plot sort of had the plateau effect, where there aren’t many peaks, just one flat surface.  The only peak was in the transition between the “before” and “after” sections, which is how this book is split up, sort of into two parts: before and after.  For those of you who have read the book, you’ll know that this was a MAJOR peak, the saddest part of the whole story.  And it did make me want to cry a little.

Another good point about the Major Peak was, to be honest, I did not see it coming.  Really after you’ve read it and you know what it is, you think “why didn’t I see that coming?”  But it was a nice little bump in what was otherwise a very plain conflict.  To some, maybe the plot was a fantastic representation of this Great Perhaps that Miles is seeking throughout the whole book, but to me, the plot was drinking, cigarettes, sex, cigarettes, drinking, sex, pranks, over and over again. And it just got kind of old.

I do like the characters though, particularly the sarcasm in their voices and their blunt sense of humor and their outtake on life. The only character that bugged me a lot was Alaska, the main girl character in the story.  For some reason she just bugged me, because she was sort of cheating on her boyfriend, but just as Miles was ready to take it to the next level with her, she would stop and say “It’s too bad I love my boyfriend” or something like that. I feel like in the end she cheated Miles, and I felt bad for him. She also seemed to think that she was the world, and when her story was finally told I found it very hard to feel sympathetic toward her.

One fantastic aspect that was in The Fault In Our Stars is also in Looking for Alaska: the writing. I have always admired John Green’s vocabulary, and how he can make teenagers seem really smart, even if their not doing very smart things.  So in this book, the writing was mostly flawless, except for a couple of things that he improved on in The Fault in Our Stars that were mistakes in this book.  Originality was up to par, I’ve never really read anything like this book.

Overall, maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on this novel. But if you were someone who read The Fault In Our Stars and are completely obsessed with that book, then you might be a little disappointed by Looking For Alaska. Without any sort of comparison, however, it can be a mostly enjoyable read.

Coming up Next: Blue Moon by Alyson Noel and Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen