Paper Towns

Paper Towns

By John Green

Read in 9th grade

This is a teen book

Quentin Jacobsen has lived in awe of Margo for his entire life. He lives in Jefferson Park, Florida, and he used to be friends with Margo when he was young. One day, they saw a man who had killed himself. Quentin was super scared, but Margo was interested. “And in everything that came afterward, [he] could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.” It is now in high school, and Margo is far from Quentin, despite living next door, because she is top dog in the school, orchestrating everything cool that happens. But one night, she climbs back into his bedroom to take him on an adventure. It is a campaign of revenge, to everyone who betrayed Margo. And at the end, Quentin feels closer to her than ever before. And then she disappears. At first, everyone thinks she is off on another one of her wild journeys. But then when she doesn’t come back, Quentin and his friends start looking for her. She has been known to leave a trail of clues, and they manage to follow them to an abandoned mini-mall, where they find the cryptic message, “You will go to the paper towns. And you will never come back.” Quentin finds that paper towns are abandoned subdivisions that never got built. Then he remembers what Margo told him. That the last string in her broke. And he comes to the morbid conclusion that she has suicided and wants him to find her body. But he can’t find her, and despite everyone’s best efforts, she is still missing on graduation day. Then, Quentin finds it. Paper towns aren’t abandoned subdivisions - they are copyright traps that only exist on maps. And the page on which he finds the info has one comment. That one New York paper town will have a population of one until the next day. Panicked, Quentin takes his new car and drives with his friends to find the girl he thought he knew. But the closer he gets, the more until Margo Margo seems. When they find her at last, she explains everything to him. She has always seen herself as a two dimensional paper girl, something everyone likes. But she decided that if she was going to be a paper girl, she should be in a paper town. And so, she did the only thing she could - and left. Quentin sees that they are going different ways, and lets go.

Note: Plot is way more complex than I could describe here.