Review: Looking for Alaska by John Green.

Book: Looking for Alaska

Author: John Green

Pages: 231

How Long it Took Me To Read: 3-4 days.

Plot Summary: The book takes off when Miles Halter decided to leave his home in Florida and transfer to a boarding school called Culver Creek Boarding School in Alabama in hopes of making a change in his life. Miles is a loner, he doesn’t have a single friend in his present school and his main interest in life is to find out and memorise the last words of famous people. Miles hopes that moving to Culver Creek Academy will make his high school experience a better-rounded one.

At Culver Creek, Miles meets and befriends an odd-ball group of people. There is Chip Martin aka The  Captain, his roommate and closest friend who loves reading and memorising world capitals. He is a scholarship kid who has a huge chip on his shoulder. There is also Takami, who remains a secondary character at best. Then there is Alaska young, a cigarette smoking, cigarette selling, strawberry wine drinking foul mouthed feminist who has a roomful of books for whom Miles falls for at first sight. But Alaska Young is a complicated enigma.

This one year in Miles’ life changes him forever in ways he couldn’t even imagine.

Characters: There is Miles himself, our central character, the one from whose perspective we see the rest of book and it’s world. I didn’t like Miles. I really didn’t like him. There were points in the book I wanted to get inside the book and punch him in the face. I can’t even pinpoint exactly what I disliked so much but let me try. He was whiny. Oh so whiny! And so dam sensitive. And slightly selfish. Not someone I wanted to root for at all.

His roommate Captain was a much better character. He was a scholarship student from the trailer park. He was bright and fun and determined to do better in life and buy his mother a proper house and move her out of her trailer. I liked him immensely.

Then there is our tittle character Alaska Young, I liked her best. She has a roomful of books- I liked her immediately on reading that. She is building her Life’s Library- I like! She is fun, well-read and a feminist. She is clearly troubled but keeps her troubles to herself. She drinks and smokes and is no way the typical heroine of Young Adult books. I wish there was more of Alaska and less of whiny Miles in the book.

What I liked: The writing was great. I love John Green and his writing is pretty much flawless. So even though the story or the characters didn’t make my heart sing, the writing was a joy to read.

 I also really liked Alaska Young- a book collector, a master prankster and all-round fun girl. Reading about her was great too.

I loved how realistic this book was- the characters were all real, no one was a Greek God or model beautiful. They were short, too skinny, had pimples and spots and were like regular normal teenagers. I also liked they weren’t perfect kids they drank, smoked, hooked up and used bad language.

What I didn’t Like: Oh lord so much! I really didn’t like this book; hence it took me 3-4 days to read. I hated it. I didn’t want to but I did.

I didn’t like Miles. Not one bit. He could get hit by a truck and I wouldn’t care.

The whole story was a bit blah to me, really pointless.

The second half of the book was really boring and I almost stopped reading.

I don’t want to give away spoilers, so I won’t say what happened but I couldn’t care less about the aftermath of the ‘big deal’.

A real disappointment this book was.

General Thoughts: I am a fan of John Green.  The Fault in Our Stars was one of best books I read last year. I also loved Paper Towns and wanted to read more of this works. Out of the rest of his books, this one sounded the most appealing and I had heard really good things about this book. I thought I’d really like it. But I just didn’t. It was very pointless and didn’t move me like I think it was supposed to.

Will you like it? Maybe if you really enjoy books about coming of age and about life in a boarding school, pranks and friendship.This book has really high rating on Goodreads and has won a ton of awards and accolades, so clearly I am in the minority of readers who despised this book.

Rating: 2/5