By Callum Wilsie
I went into Looking For Alaska totally blind. I knew it was a John Green book and I knew a lot of people love it, that’s about it. I had very high expectations for this book. Unfortunately, they were not met.
This review will have two parts– one that is spoiler free, for those wanting to read the book but also wanting to avoid spoilers, and one that will not be free of spoilers.
SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
Looking For Alaska is a fairly short read. It’s the first novel from well known and critically acclaimed young adult author John Green. The version I read was about 220 pages. It’s a simple coming-of-age tale about a boy named Miles who leaves his small plain Christian town for a rugged boarding school in Alabama.
This setup seems promising, but the way it’s written just doesn’t cut it for me. First of all, Miles and his friends simply aren’t realistic, which prevents the reader from really bonding with them. On top of that, the main group of characters aren’t even very interesting.
Miles is an averagely smart, mischievous, judgmental teen boy.
Colonel, the Generic Supporting Male Character, is given a basic and very one-sided backstory which explains every action he makes.
Alaska, the love interest, is crazy smart and crazy sexy, yet painted as the worst decision maker in the world, and she’s a feminist. It feels like Green inserted the feminist thing as an afterthought, because some of Alaska’s feminist dialogue is ridiculous. It feels like a parody. You are almost left wondering if she’s meant to be an actual feminist or if she’s meant to be making fun of feminism, which doesn’t work well at all for the role she plays in the story.
Takumi, a member of the classic Core Friend Group of the story, genuinely feels like a token POC character. He’s Japanese, he raps really well, and that is truly all we get about him.
Lara, the last member of the Core Friend Group, is a pretty Romanian girl. And again, that is all we get from her. She has no personality.
The dialogue and word choices aren’t the best. I try to cut John Green some slack on this one, because it was his first novel, but if I have to read the word “deadpanned” again I’m gonna go insane. You wouldn’t think the word “deadpanned” would be used more than once in a book, but I’m pretty sure Green used “deadpanned” about 5 times as a replacement for “said”. There were other annoying things, but that was the one I noticed most clearly.
Finally, the plot.
This brings us to part 2– the non spoiler-free review. This is your chance to avert your eyes, turn the page, and pick up Looking For Alaska from your local library or bookstore.
THE PLOT REVIEW (WARNING– SPOILERS)
Oh, the plot. What a great, masterfully conceived plot.
Is what I’d say if I thought Looking For Alaska had a good plot. Which, I didn’t.
Like I mentioned earlier, I went into this book blind. Until I was about 80 pages through, I felt like I was reading a totally dry book about some kid trying to find a new life in Alabama.
But this is John Green, and that’s not how he rolls, I thought. So, just to make sure I was reading a book that would actually turn out to be interesting, I checked the one sentence summary on the inside cover.
A young boy enrolls in a boarding school and then struggles to navigate life after a fatal car crash. (paraphrased)
Oh! Boom. I knew instantly who was going to die in said fatal car crash. I knew immediately the rest of the book would be about trying to figure out more information about her after she died.
But just to be sure, I read the rest of the book.
Sure enough, at the halfway point, Alaska dies in a car crash– after making out with the main character (who, by the way, is dating Lara at the time, and the cheating is never actually addressed, and Lara is just totally fine for some reason and immediately forgives him later)
So our main character gets really sad, is convinced for about five seconds that Alaska faked her death, and then changes his mind and starts trying to figure out why she died. You know what would have been a better story? If the main character was convinced she was alive, no one believed him, and then he went on a mystery trail to find her and it turned out she actually did fake her death.
Oh, wait. That’s a different John Green novel.
Anyways, the entire second half of the novel consists of the remaining kids trying to solve the mystery of why Alaska died, combined with a bunch of forced coming-of-age baloney. It had me counting how many pages were left, struggling to not abandon the book. It feels like the first half was written in years, and the second half was written in like a couple months, through a bout of bad writers’ block.
Overall, it was, like, fine. It was okay. 7/10 stars. Nothing special.
For being a first novel, it’s amazing. I’m not saying I hated it, as much as it probably sounds like it. I just thought it could have been so much more interesting.
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