Blog post by Mal Pleasant.

1. John Green (author of TFIOS) may only write the same story over and over again but he writes it well, and Paper Towns is a great example of his teenage fiction abilities.

2. If you’re still reeling over how depressing TFIOS was, good news! This book isn’t anywhere near as soul destroying!

3. ROADTRIP!

4. Paper Towns is an interesting deconstruction of the familiar yet outdated concept of the manic pixie dream girl.

5. This book features the phrase “The world’s largest collection of black Santas” numerous times and it never gets less funny.

6. I like Walt Whitman and The Song of Myself is a wonderful poem.

7. Paper Towns is a fantastic mystery, featuring the search for a missing person desperate not to be found and the people desperate to find her.

8. It opens with children finding a dead body, followed by a string of the most elaborate pranks you will probably read.

9. Margo’s dog has the best name ever conceived.

10. There’s something about a film coming out of something? I doubt that’s why Mrs Vennall chose this week to plug the book… Right? (And Natt Wolf is a pretty great actor).

This week’s Book of the Week is John Green’s Paper Towns – so much better than the film!

The blurb says:

The thing about Margo Roth Spiegelman is that really all I could ever do was let her talk, and then when she stopped talking encourage her to go on, due to the facts that

1. I was incontestably in love with her, and

2. She was absolutely unprecedented in every way, and

3. She never really asked me any questions…

Quentin Jacobsen has always loved Margo from afar. So when she climbs through his window to summon him on an all-night road trip of revenge he cannot help but follow. But the next morning, Q turns up at school and Margo doesn’t. She;s left clues to her disappearance, like a trail of breadcrumbs for Q to follow.

And everything leads to one unavoidable question:

Who is the real Margo?