emma's Reviews > Paper Towns

welcome to the emma vs john green saga: emma reviews her least least favorite entry into the john green canon, which she read 7 years ago and still did not enjoy, even if it did not receive the same personhood-defining bone-deep all-encompassing hatred as the others.

in case you are very, very new here - and by "here" i, for once, don't just mean "the unending hellscape of my way too updated goodreads feed," but rather the john green side of this site in general - john green and i do not get along.

i somehow managed to write the top review of turtles all the way down, a feat for which my reward is getting yelled at by people with a lot of time on their hands and curious ideas on how to spend it for my sin of not agreeing with their literary opinions.

i also went back in time (during the first installment of this writing-reviews-of-books-i-read-a-while-back project) to review the fault in our stars, and spent most of it just quoting it back at itself. mixed reviews on that review as well.

and now, seeing as i have sentenced myself to hopefully reviewing almost everything i've ever read, i'll probably have to review the other 5 john green books that category unfortunately includes.

none of them have ever warranted higher than a 2 star rating.

how fun this will be for us all.

the thing about this book is that it's john green's attempt at responding to critics of his who claimed he can only write manic pixie dream girls, in what was intended to be a genre-punching self-critiquing masterpiece à la 500 Days of Summer.

but he does write manic pixie dream girls (and boys, and side characters, and so on - a real equal opportunity snoozefest), so it doesn't work.

what he TRIES to do is a boy meets girl, boy imprints on girl, boy makes girl into something she's not, takes road trip to find her when she disappears, only to learn that he has turned her into a not-person manic pixie dream girl frankenstein's monster stuff of nightmares and so on situation.

(on a sidenote, the aforementioned road trip is the only part of this book that shoots it up a notch. because i love a road trip, even when john green writes it, as it turns out.)

but the thing is - a manic pixie dream girl figure is someone without baggage, whose backstory we never learn. a quirky pretty fairy thing who shows up in our male protagonist's life to Change Him and Teach Him Something before floating off into the oblivion that is her own existence.

presumably. we wouldn't know if she has one.

and correct me if i'm wrong, but how does Margot Roth Spiegelman (bleh), whose trauma we are unaware of, whose life we know very little (if anything at all) about, who has no real fleshing out beyond the role she plays in Quentin Jacobsen's (double bleh) life...how does her showing up, teaching Quentin a lesson, then disappearing again subvert ANYTHING AT ALL?

don't actually correct me. i don't care.

mic drop.

this is part of a project i'm doing that i already outlined above. this is too long and i have a john green induced headache coming on so i'll be going into no more detail than that.