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Hello readers! My name is Kate and I'm a 20 year old English/Writing major with a passion for reading and writing. I read so many young adult book blogs and I've decided to start my own!

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Looking for Alaska

Title: Looking for Alaska
Author: John Green
Pages: 221 pages
Source: My kindle
Summary: Sixteen-year-old Miles Halter's adolescence has been one long nonevent - no challenge, no girls, no mischief, and no real friends. Seeking what Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps," he leaves Florida for a boarding school in Birmingham, AL. His roommate, Chip, is a dirt-poor genius scholarship student with a Napoleon complex who lives to one-up the school's rich preppies. Chip's best friend is Alaska Young, with whom Miles and every other male in her orbit falls instantly in love. She is literate, articulate, and beautiful, and she exhibits a reckless combination of adventurous and self-destructive behavior. She and Chip teach Miles to drink, smoke, and plot elaborate pranks. Alaska's story unfolds in all-night bull sessions, and the depth of her unhappiness becomes obvious. Green's dialogue is crisp, especially between Miles and Chip. His descriptions and Miles's inner monologues can be philosophically dense, but are well within the comprehension of sensitive teen readers. The chapters of the novel are headed by a number of days "before" and "after" what readers surmise is Alaska's suicide. These placeholders sustain the mood of possibility and foreboding, and the story moves methodically to its ambiguous climax. The language and sexual situations are aptly and realistically drawn, but sophisticated in nature. Miles's narration is alive with sweet, self-deprecating humor, and his obvious struggle to tell the story truthfully adds to his believability. Buy it here!

Review: I wish I had read this book ages ago. There is no other word to describe this novel but amazing. The story, the writing, the characters were just perfect. The story follows Miles or "Pudge" through his adventures in his boarding school with his roommate "The Colonial" and Alaska Young, the wild and beautiful girl who lives down the hall. However, as much fun as Alaska is, she cannot hide her difficult life and sadness for long. Miles falls for her, and then it turns into real love for him, but tragedy rips Alaska away from everyone. I teared up quite a bit from this novel, but it ended hopefully for me. I wouldn't say that Looking for Alaska is the best book I've ever read, but it's up there and you're crazy for not reading it!

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