Looking For Alaska by John Green
Harper Collins Children’s Books (ebook), 2005
172 Pages
I borrowed this ebook from my library and read it on my Kobo.
BLURB
First drink, first prank, first friend, first girl, last words… A poignant and moving crossover novel about making friends and growing up from American author, John Green.
Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words – and tired of his safe, boring and rather lonely life at home. He leaves for boarding school filled with cautious optimism, to seek what the dying poet Francois Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps.” Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young. Clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy, Alaska will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.
Looking for Alaska brilliantly chronicles the indelible impact one life can have on another.
OPENING SENTENCE
The week before I left my family and Florida and the rest of my minor life to go to boarding school in Alabama, my mother insisted on throwing me a going-away party.
I chose to read this for the ‘a banned book’ category of my Popsugar Reading Challenge 2015. Green’s debut novel was banned in 2013 as required reading for Sumner County (TN) schools because of ‘inappropriate language’. chose to read it because it was the only previously banned book I could find that I actually wanted to read.
Looking for Alaska is brilliant, beautiful and incredibly sad. It reminded me of The Perks of Being a Wallflower By Stephen Chbosky. Green writes perfectly about being a teenager and how intense but scary and sort of wonderful it can be. I cried like a baby when Alaska meets her tragic fate. I didn’t see it coming. There are hints from the start that something is going to happen but I didn’t expect it to be so – horrible. Miles and The Colonel never find out what really happened to Alaska – was it an accident or intentional? I can imagine the boys, as old men, still arguing about it. Looking for Alaska is brilliant. Green is another author I want to read a lot more of.
RATING
