Book Review: Looking for Alaska by John Green

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Goodreads Synopsis:

Before. Miles "Pudge" Halter's whole existence has been one big nonevent, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave the "Great Perhaps" (François Rabelais, poet) even more. He heads off to the sometimes crazy, possibly unstable, and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed-up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young, who is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart.

After. Nothing is ever the same.

221 pages

4.23 average rating on Goodreads

Published: 2005

Genre: YA, Realistic Fiction, Sob Continually Throughout because The Feels

May I just start this review by saying, WHY DID NO ONE PREPARE ME FOR THE FEELS THIS BOOK WILL CAUSE YOU TO EXPERIENCE - WHY?

Looking for Alaska is the first John Green book that I've read, and woah....mind = blown. This book is beautifully written, with just the right amount of quirk and comedy to balance the heavily dramatic topics that are present in this book. If you ask me, John Green has introduced us to a whole new style of writing and I LOVE IT. 

The characters in this book are so realistic and so well-developed that you feel as if you know them personally, as if they are your friends....and more than once throughout you wish they were your friends. I got strongly emotionally attached to all of there characters in this novel early on; I love that Alaska was such a strong, independent female character - witty and impulsive, she took crap from no one, - the type of girl everyone wishes they could be.

This book requires solitude and a plethora of tissues, which nobody warned me about (how did I manage to never get spoiled about the plot?). I spent the first half of the book mildly irritated that there were no chapters but rather "x days before"....like what the hell did the before mean? Before what? Then I finally turned the page to after, and immediately wished I could go back. I was NOT prepared to deal with what happened, and in fact I am still far from ok with it. That being said, this book makes you both laugh and cry, often within the same paragraph, so thank you for that John Green.

This book makes you think differently about the world and about the people you choose to face it with. It changes your perspective on life, and makes you want to live in the moment, and to go chase your own Great Perhaps.

In short, this book will both elate and depress you, make you laugh hysterically and sob uncontrollably. Looking for Alaska is a realistic book about teens and personal growth as they leave home to become their own person, and to discover their own Great Perhaps. 

I give this book 5/5 stars because I ABSOFRICKENLUTELY loved it! I will however warn you that there are some pretty mature topics (sexually and otherwise) in here, so maybe if you're under the age of thirteen you may want to wait a while to read it. Otherwise I absolutely recommend this book, my favorite read of 2014 thus far!

I would love to hear your opinion on Looking for Alaska, as well as your thoughts on any of John Green's work. Thanks for reading!! 

My Favorite Quotes from Looking for Alaska

I've spent the last two days reading this book whenever possible, being essentially unable to put it down. Looking for Alaska by John Green is not a book you read, so much as experience. 

This book caused me to think and feel things that no book ever has before, as it is so damn realistic. 

I have not as of yet recovered emotionally from the book enough to write a review, but that will hopefully be coming within the week. For now, I leave you with a list of my favorite quotes from the novel, the ones that inspired me and the ones that made me think and the ones that made me cry:

1. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it? - Page 32

2. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia...you spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you will escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present. - Page 55

3. Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was  drizzle and she was a hurricane. - Page 88

4. People, I thought,  wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to. - Page 100

5. That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without. - Page 144

***SPOILERS TO THE PLOT AHEAD***

6. And what is an "instant" death anyways? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous. - Page 146

7. "You can't just make me different and then leave...because I was fine before, Alaska. 

I was fine with just me, and last words, and school friends, and you can't just make me different and then die." For she had embodied the Great Perhaps - she had proven to me that it was worth it to leave behind my minor life for grander maybes, and now she was gone, and with her my faith in perhaps. You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different. - Page 172

8. Everything that comes together falls apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you - they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn't prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart. - Page 196

9. We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffer go when they did. - Page 196

10. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless. - Page 218

11. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts.... There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.... We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail. - Page 220/221

12. Thomas Edison's last words were "It's very beautiful over there." I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful. - Page 221

If anyone has other quotes from Looking for Alaska that meant something to them, please share them with me! I would also love to hear other peoples' opinions on this novel.

Until next time, thanks for reading!