Kira

Amazon has been trying to get me to read this book for about six years now, and for about six years, I honestly thought this was a book about two kids who have some sort of drunk driving incident and meet each other in rehab. FYI: that is not remotely close to what this book is about. Like, so far apart those two plots are not even on the same planet. I have no clue where I got that impression because yeah…. this book was actually light, funny, introspective and not dark at all. Silly me for putting it off for so long because I wasn't "in the mood to be depressed." My bad, no hard feelings, m'kay?

So this is actually a coming-of-age story told from the perspective of Quentin in the latter part of his senior year. After a wild night of pranks with his one-true-unrequited love, Margo, she up and disappears off the face of the earth. The police won't look for her because she's 18, and her parents won't look for her because she's run away before and they are fed up, so it is left to Quentin and his two hilarious sidekick friends to follow the clues Margo left behind and figure it all out… or not. They are really hard clues.

First things first, audio is the only way to go on this. Trust me when I tell you that the teenage male narration you will do in your head will not come close to the teenage male impression this narrator can pull off, especially when Ben gets sh*tfaced and drunk dials Quentin. It is freaking hilarious. My favorite parts of this whole story were the interactions between Quentin and his friends and listening to the narrator bring them to life magnified my enjoyment. I don't even know if I would have been interested enough to stick it out through the whole book if I had read it, but I loved this as an audio book.

It was a little slow in parts, and the end was sort of anticlimactic and overly introspective, but overall I liked it. John Green is kind of up there with Rainbow Rowell in my mind, in that I am pretty sure I will enjoy just about whatever they write. I love how their brains work and listening to their characters make general observations on life is my favorite part of the journey. You know what is also fun? Following both Rainbow Rowell and John Green on Twitter and getting little doses of their wit on a daily basis. And you know what's even better than that? When they interact with each other on Twitter: no containing the awesome. But if you're not into Twitter and you need a dose of John Green, get this one on audio and go to town.

Ha! Get it? Paper Towns? It's a pun.