Looking for Alaska

Looking for Alaska is a Young Adult novel by John Green. The book centers around 17 year old Miles "Pudge" Halter, a geeky, friendless lover of last words who decides to go to a boarding school in Alabama to seek a "Great Perhaps". Spoiler alert: Miles never finds his Great Perhaps. What he does find is friendship, in Chip "the Colonel" Martin, a poor, glib talker and the wild but beautiful Alaska Young. Through the Colonel and Alaska, Miles meets Takumi, an Asian sidekick to their adventures, and later, Lara, a Romanian immigrant who Miles briefly dates. Miles is immediately enticed by Alaska, who smokes and drinks and has a boyfriend; Miles tries his hardest to win Alaska over, and whenever he thinks he is getting close to being closer to her, she slips away.

The book is told in two parts: Before and After. The ominous foreshadowing of the "after" section is usually told through Alaska's dialogue, thus dooming her to something that I won't reveal but is pretty predictable throughout.

The ever-so-trusty website Wikipedia.org mentions that our protagonist is compared to Holden Caulfield, of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. While reading Looking for Alaska, I did not see the similarities, but after some thinking, it is very clear the two could be brothers. Each character is whiny and ultimately going nowhere-- just like both books. They are the same age, both attend boarding school, are virgins (which is stressful for both Holden and Miles, though the former spends more time complaining about it than the latter) and do their best to separate themselves from their families. Holden feels an attachment to a girl, Jane, whom he plans to call but never does so, almost exactly how Miles holds on to Alaska whom he has plans to do things with that are never explained nor played out. Both books have been controversial, with good reason: the principle characters drink, smoke, and talk about things that all teenagers talk about. Since Catcher was written a considerable amount of time before Alaska, it is safe to say it was more contentious than the more recent Alaska. And, as most books will be objectable to some extremists, it seems to me that Looking for Alaska is far more mellow than The Catcher in the Rye, in which Holden calls a prostitute and gets beaten up and goes on drinking binges and is a pathological liar.

Altogether, Looking for Alaska is a well written book. I personally don't choose to read books because of the prose in which they are written though; like most teenagers (and people in general) I read books because the plot is compelling and thought-provoking. While Green's Alaska is thought-provoking, I found myself irritated with every single character and bored- just as the book got interesting, I would turn the page and someone would ruin the scene. The climax of the book happened 139 pages into the book, and being a novel of 221 pages, that leaves 82 pages of falling action. According to the plot diagram my teacher gave to me, a book should have considerably less falling action than rising:

Looking for Alaska's plot diagram looked a little more like this:

Needless to say I felt the book was uninspired and uninspiring. The inside cover promised me a quest, complete with a dysfunctional yet sexy girl and a purpose (at least, that's how I took it) and unfortunately this book didn't provide it. If you are interested in what I was hoping this book would be, I suggest you read Going Bovine by Libba Bray which is about a teenage boy named Cameron who is diagnosed with Mad Cow Disease, which, as you might or might not know, is incurable. Your brain becomes a sponge. And you die. Or live comatose. Bovine is written in a similar fashion as Alaska and has an ending equally tragic yet much more satisfying. This book also is about family, and friendship, and wanting to be accepted (which Alaskatouches on, ever so briefly). Going Bovine is a definite two thumbs up, while Looking for Alaska is a shaky thumb pointing almost downward. (You know what I mean, right?)

If this book is on a list of books to read for school, I suggest you pick another. Don't be fooled by it's length; this book drags on as much as Wuthering Heights.

-LL