Paper Towns Is Average At Best. By Marrionetta on Apr 13, 2009 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

I purchased the novel Paper Towns by John Green at my local Borders. Having some familiarity with the author through his video blog project, Brotherhood 2.0 on Youtube, I was curious as to what his prose was like. I brought the book home, and read it in about two days. It's very much a young-adult fiction book, relying on clichés to develop characters, a mildly dull first-person narrative, and some recycled pulped themes from classic literature. I got the feeling that many of the literary allusions were intended to be accessible for someone with a limit grasp of metaphor and simile. It read the way flavorless yogurt tastes, though not in an entirely unpleasant way. The end of the novel featured a lot of the characters saying aloud the themes of the book, which left little room for reader interpretation. The dialogue also felt stiff in many points.

I wouldn't recommend it for anyone over the age of 20, though I feel it would make a good reader for someone who has an intermediate second-language grasp of the English language.