Paper Towns (John Green)

Having heard nothing but endlessly mixed reviews of John Green's second Best-Seller novel, Paper Towns, and of course, having read two of his other novels, I went into this book with an open mind, if erring slightly on the side of caution.
However, having just finished the book, I came out of it again understanding perfectly why the reviews were so mixed. To start with, we are introduced to main characters Q and Margo through a flashback into their childhood together, and the stilted memory of finding the corpse of a suicide victim in their local park. But far from traumatizing the 9 year old protagonists, it seems only to spark an unhealthy obsession in the drama of mystery in quirky, flighty Margo, and becomes nothing more than a recreational memory in child of a therapist Quentin. The next time we meet them, however, things are a little bit different.
Now, one of my favourite elements in this book would have to be the timeline of Q's life, in the months leading up to his High School graduation. For me personally, being in my final year of school, a lot of his thoughts and feelings about the sudden changes in his life are expressed perfectly, and his journey throughout the plot is deeply relatable. A line in particular which really struck an emotional chord with me personally as the expression that Q could 'feel my lungs were drowning in perverse nostalgia', as speaking from experience, leaving a place, any place, feels exactly like this.
Another admirable element to the book would be the side characters, in Q's best friends, Ben and Radar, simply for their actual realism as people. Unlike so many of John Green's characters, neither of these boys are particularly philosophical, or emotionally ponderous in the majority of their outbursts, and actually have normal, non-analytical conversations about innuendos and video games. They feel a lot like real people thrown into an extremist fictional story, which makes their role in the book even more significant. In a view of the book as a whole, the moral behind it would be, essentially, to fight against the addiction of fictional creations; to keep reality around you, and to shake your head at the romanticism of loss. Ben and Radar understand this perfectly. They are very much characters of the real world, where life goes on, and people come and go, Q, on the other hand, is not.
The two central characters here, are very, very John Green. What I mean by this is that the, albeit beautifully written and emotionally charged, protagonists seem to have fallen into the unfortunate trappings of unoriginal parallels with their fictional siblings. For example, Q, in Paper Towns, is a simple, mentally stable and slightly nerdy and unpopular, normal teenage boy; whilst love interest Margo is less so, being adorably unhinged and kooky, as well as clever and thoughtful, overflowing with weird little habits and quirks which no boy can possibly resist. Unfortunately, these descriptions could also be that of, let's say, Will Grayson and Jane from 'Will Grayson, Will Grayson', or perhaps Pudge and Alaska from 'Looking for Alaska'. The three books could arguably be read as a set, each with a similar ending, and each with a distinct lack of the originality famed in Green's latest book 'The Fault in Our Stars'. Hazel and Augustus seem to have taken a different path to their predecessors, in that their personalities are equally balanced, and it is in fact their bodies, and lives which serve as their character flaws, and it is perhaps that which makes TFIOS so popular in comparison to the rest.
To sum up; don't disregard this book. Don't read it looking for the worlds most original love story. But don't brush aside as the least, either. Read it alone. Read the first two, and wait a while. Read it first, and then read the other two. In my opinion, it is neither better, nor worse, nor more interesting, nor less so than the other famed Green novels, but nether the less, this does not, in any shape, form or fashion, stop it from being a damned good read.