So this book isn’t the most brilliantly written in a literary sense but I feel like the themes and ideas John Green tries to put across in this book are very real and raw. Now I’ve heard this book is very similar to John Green’s ‘Looking for Alaska’ but I haven’t read it, so I wouldn’t know.

This book revolves around the fact that not everything we think to be true is in fact true. When Quentin and Margo look at their town from atop the SunTrust building they realise how material their small world really is, people getting on with their routine lives amongst ageing streets. “All those paper people living in their paper houses,burning the future to stay warm” as Margo suggests. Is that really all we are? “Paper-frail” people living meaningless lives in “paper towns”?  It brings a whole new meaning to our self-absorbed and greed filled existence. Green is almost questioning the validity of humanity itself in my opinion. Are our lives really all that worthwhile?

The second topic I think John Green brings up is the reality of idolisation. We live in a society run by stars we worship in every form. Celebrity culture is what’s in magazines, Tumblr and on our adolescent room walls, admiring and revering every actor, singer, and model we aspire to become. However, in reality we don’t know them at all. Quentin thinks he knows Margo Roth Spiegelman and is in love with his idea of her, until he realises that he does not know her at all. That super, cool, awesome girl in high school we all wanted to be, yeah she wasn’t as super, cool, and awesome as we imagined her in our heads, and neither are the countless celebrities we think we know from a few minutes of interviews and screen time.

So overall I think that although this book could have been written a lot better, and I really think it could have done without the ending as I feel like it defies what Green was trying to put across, I do think that the messages are very relevant and give us a lot to think about.

Hasta pronto,

Nadia x