Paper Towns

The Book

I was looking forward to reading this after so enjoying John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, but sadly this does not compare. The Fault in Our Stars appealed to all ages because although the characters were young adults, it contained philosophical and thought-provoking passages about mortality and life that everyone thinks about. Paper Towns has no interesting snippets or quirky asides but is a novel about fitting in, something that every teenager ruminates over and comes up against - the pecking order and cliques in high school, becoming an individual in your own right and conforming with society. As an adult, this has either been embraced or reluctantly accepted.

Quentin Jacobsen was best friends with Margo Roth Spiegelman before high school, but peer pressures mean that cool girl Margo can't be seen to hang out with geek Quentin as they get older. One night, however, she appears at his window and encourages him to drive her out around late night Orlando to dispense revenge on her two-timing boyfriend and her friends.

Up to this point the book is quite entertaining, but when Margo disappears and Quentin spends the rest of the novel investigating clues to where she might have gone, the pace slows and I lost interest. It is worth reading to the end, however, as the last fifty pages involving a race-against-time road trip and the confrontation with Margo are more what I was expecting from the author. There are high brow literary references aplenty and Walt Whitman's poem Leaves of Grass seems to have the main focus, suggesting that opting out of society is not the best solution and that we are all connected like the roots of grass.   


Official movie site


The Film

I was half afraid that there was going to be a Hollywood happy ending. There is, but just not to the extent that could have turned the film in to a teen romance; which means it is faithful to the book and probably John Green's vision. By now we know that he likes to play with traditional stories and what our expectations are.

Apart from cutting an extraneous visit to Seaworld from the night escapades, these are left more or less the same but with a few changes in the pranks.

 The differences start with the road trip, as this is not a race against time due to Margo moving on, but in order to get back for the all important Prom and a celebratory slo-mo dance. In the book, Q picks up his two geek friends and Lacey at graduation, where they had all promised to wear nothing under their gowns - hence needing to get t-shirts etc at the gas station.

 In the film, the urgency isn't there so much (they even stop for a chance to give characters the opportunity to pair off, make out and muse) and when they all arrive at Margo's paper town hide-out, she isn't there. The friends leave Quentin behind and escape the sharp tongue of a less than pleased Margo at seeing them.

There's the Hollywood touch - Margot is given a more warm and sympathetic gloss (I guess otherwise you wonder why Quentin would be infatuated with her in the first place), rather than the spoilt, troubled, selfish character I felt she was in the book.

My highlight (and others in the audience) was the recognition of seeing Ansel Elgort (Gus from The Fault in Our Stars) in a cameo as the gas station attendant.