looking for alaska

looking for alaska
john green
fiction/ya
dutton
published 2005

before.  Miles "Pudge" Halter's whole existence has been one big nonevent, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave the "Great Perhaps" (Francois Rabelais, poet) even more.  He heads off to the sometimes crazy, possibly unstable, and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe.  Because down the hall is Alaska Young.  The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed-up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young, who is an event unto herself.  She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart.

after.  Nothing is ever the same.

I fell so hard and far into this book that I would look up every now and then and for a brief moment felt like I was living that experience.  That those events happened to my friend and I was living in that grief.  It doesn't happen very often to me, but it's both wonderful and painful when it does.

I think that I connected with this book so much because Alaska reminded me of a very good friend of mine.  I seriously considered that John Green knew this friend of mine, but logically that doesn't work out.  *sigh*

I loved Alaska, Colonel & Takumi and I even loved Pudge most of the time.  Like others before him, Pudge was another self-absorbed sort of boy, but then when you experience what he does how do you not make it all about you?

John Green writes so clearly that I could picture every scene in my head as if I had been there.  I felt the oppressive heat and the frigid January cold.  I knew what everyone looked like without really needing to think about.  They were just there, already in my head.  I could see the Smoking Hole, hear Satan the Swan at the lake and smell the wet hay in the barn.  He has a way, I think, of describing everything so perfectly, but without going into so much detail that you have to stop to think about.  It flows seamlessly and you're reading without realizing that you're reading.  You're just there.  You're present.