Looking for Alaska (by John Green)

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps,” this is what Miles Halter, aka ‘Pudge’ says when he decides to go off to boarding school in Alabama (yes, Alabama…). Considering that Miles is a 16-something teenager, quoting François Rabelais, this is not only err… peculiar (what teenager is into finding out what famous people’s last words were?), it’s also symptomatic of most teens in similar coming-of-age novels: they all seem to be older, wiser and wittier than any 15 or 16-year-old I’ve ever known. And Miles, ‘the Colonel’, Alaska et al. are no different. Similar to how Juno and a series like Gilmore Girls can appeal to both teens *and* adults, John Green’s debut is clever and funny and will make you smile, giggle, and laugh out loud one minute and have you trying to fight back tears the next.

Hidden (or not so hidden, since Miles has a class called ‘World Religions” ) beneath the tale of friendship, love and loss are musings about religion, the search for meaning, and the nature of being a person… “the nature of the labyrinth and the way out of it”, Miles writes in his notebook, the metaphor of life that keeps on recurring in the book and that John Green challenges us to try and answer for ourselves.

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