Book review
Last words and first love!
Looking for Alaska is a saddening novel about making friends, pulling pranks, and growing up. A story of a boy, Miles halter (or pudge), obsessed with memorizing people’s last words. He bids farewell to his life old life in Florida and comes to a boarding school, Culver Creek, to seek what the poet Francois Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps.” Culver Creek greets him with it all, friends, family, nickname, but most importantly, love. Beautiful and emotionally confused, Alaska Young, not only steals his heart but sucks him into her endless labyrinth. Because after all, if people were rain, he was drizzle and she was a hurricane.
REVIEW
I have been reading John Green for as long as I can recall and ironically I read this one last. I can’t believe this was his debut novel. It’s a brutally honest and heart-wrenching piece. The central theme of the novel is the labyrinth.
Alaska loves the last words of Simón Bolívar: “Damn it, how will I ever get out of this labyrinth!”. She isn’t sure if he means life or death but then she concludes that the real question is “How will we escape this labyrinth of suffering?” Alaska says “You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll 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 past.”
And that’s what Looking For Alaska is about. Finding answers, falling in love, crying over mistakes, and whatnot.
I like Miles and I relate to Alaska a little too much. Even though Alaska is all about mysteries, it is no mystery to the reader’s why miles could fall for her so easily.
One thing I love about John Green is that he compiles you to think, challenge, and push your limits. It’s like you start reading and your brain absorbs it all little by little. What started as a simple paragraph ends with a heartfelt piece and leaves you in awe. Another wonderful thing about his novels is that I think about them. It makes you wanna introspect every decision made, every theory revealed, it’s like your mind is always occupied if you have John Green in hand.
Summing it up, Looking for Alaska is another fantastic John Green book that deserves infinite love and thought.
Rating: ???
Overwhelming
