Book-It '21! Book #27: "Looking For Alaska" by John Green

 The all new 50 Books Challenge!

Title: Looking For Alaska by John Green

Details: Copyright 2005, Harper Collins

Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "'If people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.'

Miles Halter's whole life has been one big non-event, until he meets Alaska Young.

Gorgeous, clever and undoubtedly screwed up, Alaska draws Miles into her reckless world and irrevocably steals his heart. For Miles, nothing can ever be the same again.

Looking For Alaska is the award-winning debut that brilliantly captures the exquisite painful joy of living and loving. Poignant, funny and heartbreaking, this novel will stay with you forever."


Why I Wanted to Read It: I've long heard things about John Green, both good and bad. I've heard acclaim for his work, but also much scuttlebutt on Tumblr, to the point where he eventually had to leave the platform.
I don't know if it was the fact he actually responded to people or if he was ever Neil Gaiman-level insufferable on Tumblr (this is a review of a John Green book, I don't want to make this about Neil Gaiman, but permit me this tangent about another famous author. Seriously, if you're a bestselling author with multiple successful screen adaptations of your work, do you really need to read through fan posts on Tumblr and smugly comment, especially taking credit for things you did not write/do? You cannot possibly be that starved for validation when you've had a fan base since your late twenties. Fan spaces are for FANS, and creators in fan spaces is never a good idea, even on the rare occasions creators do something positive in a fan space. It's important to have communities to talk about and consider and even criticize something without anyone famous deciding to meddle in and perhaps put you on blast to other fans, to say nothing of the fact you get people who want/expect the creators to notice THEM and it becomes about that, rather than a fan community. Seriously, Gaiman's gone quite deep into the weeds of fan posts/spaces, and the percentage of times he's done something positive is far surpassed by the percentage of times he's been insufferable not just in fan behavior/spaces although that's bad enough, but questionable otherwise. And I say all that as someone who genuinely loves several of the things he's created and helped create. But I digress!).
But I kept hearing praise for Green and a reconsideration of the "discourse" on Tumblr (which largely took place six years ago) by many suggests it was less legitimate criticism and more socially acceptable harassment of a celebrity with plenty of bad takes including a notoriously terrible one that made it into a very badly-aged Huffpost clickbait piece.

With all that in mind, I tackled what was his first book, through an extremely generous gift from my friend Claudine, the Secular Matron Saint of this blog!


How I Liked It: When is a trope not a trope? I mean, what is something you might think is a trope turns out actually not to be that trope at all? Is there a term specifically for that? Because if not, we need to coin one because this book describes that exactly (although it's not the first time I've encountered this phenomena). What do I mean? We'll get there!

Meet unhappy Miles Halter, a teen not clicking with his Florida high school and headed to a nice boarding school in Alabama. Miles loves biographies and has encyclopedic knowledge of the last words of many famous figures.

While he never clicked at his school in Florida, Miles seems to more or less instantly fit in his new boarding school. He befriends his roommate Chip aka the Colonel (deemed that for his organizing of pranks) who christens Miles with a nickname: "Pudge" (because he's so skinny). Miles/Pudge meets the Colonel's friends, and they become his friends, too. There's free-style rapper Takumi and, most importantly, the charismatic but clearly troubled Alaska who comes from a troubled background. Pudge instantly is drawn to Alaska but she has a boyfriend (and there's the fact she's miles ahead of him in a lot of ways), so she sets him up with Romanian immigrant Lara, who he starts dating.

The kids pull increasingly impressive pranks and navigate life in their boarding school and Pudge enjoys life there far more than he clearly has before. But there's been a countdown to something since the book started and more than halfway through, we figure out what it is. Tragedy strikes, and the little crew must all deal with it.

Rocked as they've never been before, they all struggle to cope in the aftermath, and Pudge faces a crisis of identity as well as his own feelings about death. A mystery is somewhat cleared and a resolution (somewhat) reached by the book's end, the characters presumably forever changed.

I admit, when I heard this was a book about a "quirky" girl that enchants and awakens a teenage boy written by a male author, I all but ran in the other direction. I have not had good experiences this year alone. But! A book series I love dearly, Stargirl, is superficially about a quirky girl that enchants and awakens a teenage boy and is written by a male author. But Stargirl isn't a manic pixie dream girl (I'm using that term as the sexist trope, meaning a fictional "quirky" one-dimensional female character that has no purpose other than to further the male character/s) and neither is Alaska Young. Alaska has a life and backstory and more than a few problems of her own.

The main character ogles her (which she calls out) and frequently reduces her to an object of fantasy and what she means to him, even after he's in a relationship. He's called out not only by Alaska herself, but the other characters for reducing her this way:

"Don't you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don't love the crazy, sullen bitch."

And there was something to that, truth be told. (pgs 117 and 118)

Alaska is also ostensibly a feminist, but she's not a straw feminist (which if this was written by Neil Gaiman, she might be; sorry, NOW I'm done!) and her calling out of sexism and misogyny isn't played for laughs, she's shown to have a point.

As to the rest of the novel, I realized that I kept forgetting this was intended for young adults, since the teenagers swear realistically, talk frankly about sex (and occasionally engage in it), and the teen patter and angst is surprisingly realistic. Green isn't alone in this, of course. I've read YA novels since before I was actually of YA age that felt (and were) a far more realistic view of adolescence than the sanitized version that not only still somehow gets pushed, but is apparently so commonplace as to make novels like this remarkable (and frequently challenged by people who would apparently rather their children experience drugs, sex, and violence firsthand rather than just reading about it in book-form).

Green also gets the core of what this book is about so strongly that the story itself seems like it'll age better than most YA (and given that this book is sixteen years old and still popular, apparently it has). The characters are genuinely interesting and distinct, and the situations compelling with both big and small plot reveals well-laid out.
I can't tell if it's the fact I knew this was Green's first novel going in and I wouldn't have noticed otherwise, but I'd feel remiss not to note that there are a few times (not often, but a few) when this does feel a bit like a first novel with a bit of hesitancy and stumbling just a bit. But overall the story and characters are well-written and multi-dimensional.

When is a trope not a trope? There's been some blowback to the term "manic pixie dream girl" and of course overuse (it's intended to single out a sexist trope, not describe all quirky women either real or fictional). Zooey Deschanel is not a manic pixie dream girl because she's a human being, not a fictional character. But she might play a manic pixie dream girl were she to play a quirky, empty character that exists only to further the male main character's narrative. It's also worth noting that that term was not coined at the time of this book's publication (although the trope obviously existed). The fact the characters call it the main character's reduction of Alaska in text is important.
When is a trope not a trope? When the author does the work to make a better, more dimensional story.

Notable:

"So, do you really memorize last words?"

She ran up beside me and grabbed my shoulder and pushed me back on to the porch swing.

"Yeah," I said. And then hesitantly, I added, "You want to quiz me?"

"JFK," she said.

"That's obvious," I answered.

"Oh, is it now?" She asked.

"No. Those were his last words. Someone said, 'Mr President, you sure can't say Dallas doesn't love you, ' and then he said, 'That's obvious,' and then he got shot." (pg 26)

I can't tell if this is supposed to be a reflection of Pudge's knowledge or just the nature of this sort of thing, but it's generally agreed upon that Nellie Connally, wife of the Texas governor (who was wounded in the assassination) accompanying the Kennedys in the notorious convertible said of the large crowds welcoming the President's appearance in Dallas either
"Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you."

Or "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas hasn't given you a warm welcome."

And the President is said, according to Connally's testimony before the Warren Commission, that the President responded with

"No, you certainly can't."

That's always struck me as a little too pat (and the sort of irony people adore) and we're taking the word of some remembering it before a deeply infamous and very public traumatic event, but I believe it could certainly be true, and certainly it's considered JFK's official last words.

To be fair though, Green himself addresses the fact last words are difficult to verify for a number of the reasons I just mentioned.

_______________________________________________________________

There's many things in this novel that I suspect will age well (and have), but this would fall under what a great book blog would call "SIGNS IN WAS WRITTEN IN 2005 DEPARTMENT":

Outside I heard the payphone ring. Given the fact that 190 boarders share five paypones, I was amazed how infrequently it rang. We weren't supposed to have cell phones, but I'd noticed that some of the Weekday Warriors carried their surreptitiously.  (pg 48)

Final Grade: A