It. Was. Amazing.
Miles Halter is a sixteen year-old seeking more out of life. Tired of his "boring" school friends and the life he leads in general, he goes off to boarding school in search of what he calls a Great Perhaps: the possibility of something new and amazing happening to him. He finds more adventures than he bargained for when he meets his roommate, Chip "The Colonel" Martin, Takumi, Lara and Alaska Young, a beautiful and fascinating young woman he is dying to have. Amidst strict teachers, precalc tests, study sessions at McDonalds and a few pranks, Miles finds what could be his Great Perhaps...and something more.
John Green's prose is pitch perfect in this book, and the messages woven carefully into the next are enough to throw you for a loop, make you question what you thought you knew and then make you want even more. Every object, look, face, detail in the fabric has its own story, its own meaning in the book which goes way beyond what you first imagine.
Because of its poignance and depth, "Looking For Alaska" is now a frontrunner for my new favorite book. It's still sinking in, but I have to say...Never has a book told the parallels of our lives so well.
Even if you are not a sixteen year-old boy at a boarding school in Alabama, you can still identify with other aspects of Green's novel. Personally, the labyrinth of suffering, the love stories and the connection of the Religions class to the final essay, which connected every point in the novel, were some of my favorite things. Those words have stuck with me till today, and hopefully they will stick with you too.
Looking For Alaska Review by Courtney Justus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
