Book title: Looking for Alaska
Author: John Green
Publisher: Dutton Juvenile
Rating: 4.5/5
Looking for Alaska book by John Green— Review
To begin with, I’ll say that John Green is of my favorite authors and I really loved reading his Looking for Alaska. The book has fresh and different perspectives about teenage life.
It is the debut book of John Green but has the power to hold your attention until the last page of the novel. Miles Halter, the main character, is a sixteen-year-old guy who is tired of his boring ad lonely life at home.
He likes reading biographies and looks at what the famous people felt and said when they were close to death. For example, the last words of François Rabelais were “I go to see a Great Perhaps.” To seek his great perhaps, Miles leaves for the boarding school in Alabama where his new buddies call him Pudge.
The story revolves around the teenagers and how they live their life at the boarding school amongst pranks, bets, and disastrous parties. There he meets the beautiful and emotionally-confused Alaska Young and gets attached to her. One day, Alaska goes missing, and… I wouldn’t like to be a spoiler by sharing more of the story.
I enjoyed reading this book, partly because of the story, and partly because it made me wonder about a lot of things. I love books that make me think.
The best thing about Looking for Alaska is that it isn’t a typical boy-meets-girl love story. It’s more of a book that shows the meaning of life, guilt and grief, and first loves and last words.
Top quotes from Looking for Alaska
Sharing below some of my favourite lines from the book:
1. “Thomas Edison’s last words were “It’s very beautiful over there”. I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful.”
2. “Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
3. “At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.”
4. “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 drizzle and she was hurricane.”
5. “What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.”
6. “True love will triumph in the end – which may or may not be a lie, but if it is a lie, it’s the most beautiful lie we have.”
7. “That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them.”
8. “’Sometimes I don’t get you,’ I said.
She didn’t even glance at me. She just smiled toward the television and said, ‘You’ll never get me. That’s the whole point.’”
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