Peter Leach

Albeit this novel's seemingly high praise, I found Looking For Alaska to be a quick read. I read it fast so I could move onto a different novel. The story follows an unlikeable young man whom starts off the book by being disrespectful to the two friends who bothered to show up to his going away party. He decides to go to a boarding school to find the "great perhaps" which is Green's way of trying to add philosophical notes throughout the novel that don't really need to be there. He arrives to boarding school where his impressionable self gets roped into chainsmoking with his roommate and drinking vodka infused milk. He simultaneously falls for a girl named Alaska that is no good for him or really anyone because she chain smokes as well, defies authority at all turns, is extremely tempermental, cheats on her boyfriend, and plays immature pranks. The plot takes forever to come to fruition because every seven pages the characters are taking a smoke break. It feels like the story keeps being paused. On top of that there isn't a significant amount of depth to this read either. When something finally gets around to happening in the story it is lackluster, predictable, and leaves the reader wondering why they are wasting their time. Im the middle of the story a person dies marking the big shocker of the book. Unfortunately the characters weren't likeable enough to draw real empathy from this tragedy. The characters then tried to figure out why this person died in an attempt to spark life into a novel that never truly had any. The last part of the story is the characters playing a prank that turned out to be a "you should have been there" kind of moment. This was a shame for me. This novel seemed to focus so much on character development that they forgot to make the characters ones you wish to see develop. Green really took his time with this story to the point where one could blame a lack of vision where he falls back on the reliable: Boy falls for girl, teen rebellion, teen antic cliché. This was a boring uninterested, wouldn't even bring to a hair salon style read. This story could have been written in 35 pages.