Review- Looking for Alaska

 "Before. Miles "Pudge" Halter's whole existence has been one big nonevent, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave the "Great Perhaps" (François Rabelais, poet) even more. Then he heads off to the sometimes crazy, possibly unstable, and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed-up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young, who is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart.

After. Nothing is ever the same."

Jami's Review:

If you have never read a book by John Green, shame on you. Go get one. Immediately. If you have read one of his books, then you should know that Looking for Alaska lived up to all of my expectations. It was everything a John Green book should be. Effortlessly humorous, engaging, marvelously written, and heart-wrenching.

I dove into Looking for Alaska. Over the first couple of days, I read maybe ten pages at a time before setting it aside. Not because it wasn't good; it was so beyond good. I just wanted to take my time with it. When you get a taste of John Green, you want to savor it. But once I hit the page 50 mark, I couldn't stop. I spent a good three hours of my day just reading until I reached the last page. 

Let me tell you something about John Green. He is not afraid to make you laugh. He is not afraid to make you smile. And he is definitely not afraid to make you cry. But there's a lot more to Looking for Alaska than a story about a boy and a girl and their friends and how they all mesh in this labyrinth of life.  Looking for Alaska is a story about how you never really know a person as well as you think you do. It's about different people knowing small parts of a person, but even all of those small parts don't make up a whole. It's about life having mysteries that will never be solved, and it's about the love you can feel for someone you hardly know, for a piece of someone you hardly know. 

I don't really know much to say about this book. There's not much you can say without giving it all away. LfA was John Green's first book, though it is the second of his that I have read (Paper Towns was the first) and all I can say is that John Green makes me look at my life in a light that I have never looked at it before. He makes you want to go out and live, truly live, and not worry about things that really don't matter. Maybe we should all take a page from Miles Halter's book and search for our own Great Perhaps. 

Or we could all sit around and read more John Green. Yeah. That sounds like the better option to me, personally. For me, Looking for Alaska gets five beautifully glowing golden stars.

Bryson's Review:

This book was beautiful. I loved all the characters, especially Alaska. It was a story that seemed more real to me than most because *SPOLIER, DO NOT CONTINUE IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE SPOILED*

it wasn’t the perfect happy ending. It was real, raw. It had that sense of ‘not everything works out’. And I loved that. Not everything is going to have a perfect little happy ending with rainbows and unicorns. Sometimes there is love, and sometimes there is hate. Sometimes there is life, and sometimes there is death.
And that’s what I love about John Green and his writing. He isn’t afraid to be real.


*IT IS SAFE TO CONTINUE NOW FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NOT READ THE BOOK*
Alaska was the perfect bad-girl who wasn’t all that bad. She was broken, but she had that sort of aura about her that I couldn’t help being attracted too. She was funny, sad, and beautiful.
Another thing I enjoyed about this book was that it was told from Pudge’s perspective. I really love when YA fiction set from boy’s perspectives gets into the nitty gritty things that boys go through. It’s that rawness factor that is real, that we have to deal with, that we can’t escape.

This book has definitely made me a John Green fan. His writing was different and real. It was funny and sad. This book will make you laugh and cry. But it teaches you, too. About love, and about friendship, and that even though someone is bad doesn’t mean that they’re all bad inside.

If you like John Green and want something similar to him, I recommend anything by A.S King.

PS: Happy Holidays everyone from Jami and Bryson!