A Review of 'Looking for Alaska' by John Green

“First drink.

First prank

First friend

First girl

Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words—and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet François Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps.” Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young. Clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy, Alaska will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.

Looking for Alaska brilliantly chronicles the indelible impact one life can have on another. A stunning debut, it marks John Green’s arrival as an important new voice in contemporary fiction.”

Easily one of the greatest, most eye-opening books I have ever read. I gush about a lot of the books that I read and write reviews on, but this one totally isn’t exaggerated. I feel a little bit closer to this author because I have been watching him and his brother video blog back and forth to each other (well, a lot of the old ones as well as the new ones when they come in. The DFTBA music video that is in a previous entry is one of their video blogs. Seriously check them out. They’re built of awesomeness!). They talk about certain things in their video blogs that are in the books (which was weird, because when they started this video project, ‘Looking for Alaska’ had already been written and published…

I liked how well-developed the characters were (Alaska, the Colonel, Takumi, Lara, and Pudge—a.k.a. Miles). I can’t really compare these guys to the people I know or even to myself, but I can imagine they were fun characters to write—they were sure fun to read! Any way, they were so well developed that I would get butterflies in my stomach when I sensed that something bad was going to happen. I felt guilt when they felt guilt. I was always nervous that they were going to get caught at the smoking hole… most of the time they didn’t, but the threat was still there.

This might sound a little morbid, but I read a number of books that have to do with death. I find them fascinating. But I’ve never thought about what would happen if one of my friends or someone that I knew that was around my age died. I’m sorry guys, this is horrible. Of course I don’t want anyone to die. But I guess what I’m trying to say is you don’t really know what you have until it’s gone. Like many songs, the description above, and this book has tried to convey to me. It only got through my thick skull just after reading this book.

This was life-changing.

I really, really, really highly recommend this book, but if you are of a younger audience, I would suggest that you wait until you are mature enough to read books with tons of swearing, hard drinking, smoking, and a sex scene or two. I’ll leave that up to you and your care-takers though. Otherwise, please pick up this book and John Green’s other books (which include ‘An Abundance of Katherine’s’ and ‘Paper Towns.’ Both of which I have read and were interesting and very good in their own ways).

Thanks for reading guys! I’m not sure how often I’ll be writing for this blog considering school starts tomorrow… I have AP English this year, so I hope that means we read all sorts of really cool books! Then I can write stuff about them when I complete them!

--Jude