The ending solidifies for me that Margo is an unlikeable, terrible jerk.Īlthough honestly, if I really put some thought into it, she comes across very much like the stereotyped manic pixie dream girl but also very much like a traumatized child who grew up to become reckless because she wasn’t treated like a traumatized child when she should have been. The actual ending of the novel is not just anticlimactic, but in my opinion, a major letdown. John Green must be, too, since it’s a recurring theme in a few of his novels. I’ve always been a sucker for a good tale of teens traveling alone. My personal favorite part of the book is near the end, when four teenagers skip their high school graduation and pile in a van to (hopefully) bring the witch hunt to a close. He goes alone at times and his friends accompany him at other times, and he is simultaneously tormented by the fear of Margo’s death and obsessed with the possibility that she left a breadcrumb trail to lead him to her. Q, reeling from the night of absurdities, becomes totally preoccupied with hunting down Margo’s whereabouts with clues she left behind. So basically, he says she’s intentionally garbage, but he doesn’t actually outright say it. I wanted her to be someone the reader could learn to empathize with, someone who makes very different decisions from most of us but whose decisions have a kind of internal consistency and integrity that makes them morally defensible.” I’m not the only one John Green has been asked (evidently a number of times) whether Margo was meant to be likeable and in his response on his FAQ about Paper Towns, he basically skirts the question by saying things like “I don’t really think characters need to be likable for stories to be worth reading.” and “I don’t know where people got the idea that characters in books a supposed to be likable.” and even “Did I intend Margo to be likable? I intended her to be complex. Margo Roth Spiegelman is the greatest irritation of my life. Paper Towns is the story of the night Quentin “Q” Jacobsen is accosted by his frenzied next door neighbor who has climbed through his bedroom window after roughly a decade of no communication, the escapades she drags him along to participate in, and the weeks that follow.

I will say that having read it a few times, it’s growing on me a little bit as I notice more things that I didn’t necessarily notice before. I’ve read it two and a half times (half because I started reading it to my partner in Spring but just kind of lost steam and never finished it) and I just don’t love it. I’m going to be real with you, Paper Towns is not my favorite book.

Paper Towns by John Green