Looking for Alaska Review

Why Looking for Alaska by John Green?

As you know Looking for Alaska is the book I picked for my summer reading project. One of the reasons I picked it was because I read The Fault in Our Stars last school year and it is by far my FAVORITE BOOK EVER. So of course me being a little bias for John Green books I thought “Oh, this will have to be such a great book!” It did not let me down! One of the things I did not like much about it though was the tone of Looking for Alaska went from kind of a love story and light hearted happiness to depressing death. For people I would recommend this book to would be of course John Green lovers and it is definitely not an easy book to read because of how depressing it is but if you like books with a suspense I would also read it.

Looking For Alaska

“After”

After is the second section of Looking for Alaska. When you are reading “Before” it will say “one hundred ten days before” or “fifty-eight days before” and so on, then you get to after. Right when you finish before you will want to find out why they were counting down the days so you automatically can’t put the book down. Of course you know something was wrong because they were talking about how drunk they were in the last few pages of before. I think that the biggest “hook” of the book was just the fact that the days would count down because you would really want to know what it leads up to and the whole concept of a “before” and “after”. Something HUGE has to happen that you split the book into two sections.

"The Great Perhaps"

Pudge wanted to leave Florida to find “The Great Perhaps”. I think that most of the story was about finding what really “The Great Perhaps” is. I also believe that it is the most relatable to. In our own way we are all kind of in search for our own “Great Perhaps” and some of us might be closer to knowing what it is than we think.

Looking for Alaska is written with an unusual but cool structure. In Before, the individual passages act as a countdown, starting 136 days before, to a very important event. After the event, the book counts up to the end of the story. The countdown/up gives the book a powerful suspense.

Looking for Alaska: Characters, Setting, and Conflict

For my summer reading book I chose Looking for Alaska by John Green. Miles, also known as Pudge is one of the main characters, he is described as tall and skinny and is the protagonist of the book. Alaska Young is the girl that Miles is in love with, and another main character is Chip who is Pudge’s roommate. The setting of the book starts off at Pudge’s house for his going away party. Pudge is leaving for boarding school at Culver Creek in Alabama.

One of the big conflicts in Looking for Alaska was Pudge vs. Miles (person vs. self). Throughout the book Pudge/Miles is trying to find himself and who he really is, looking for “The Great Perhaps”. In the BEFORE section of the book, he is Miles. He is friendless and unhappy until Culver Creek where he gets the nickname Pudge from Chip. Then he works harder and harder to discover who this newfound Pudge is. During the AFTER section when Alaska dies, he realizes who and what Pudge is. He finds “The Great Perhaps” and moves forward into his new life. He gave into peer pressure, and pulled pranks, did drugs, and everything, just to find out who he really is.

To all my fellow The Fault In Our Stars readers and lovers.

To all my fellow The Fault In Our Stars readers and lovers.

I have come to bring some breaking news.

I only have 83 pages left in the book, and all I want to do is cry because I do not want it to be over so soon!

But! Don't fear, I have come to talk about this wonderful book full of greatness. As we all know cancer really sucks, at the beginning of  TFIOS Hazel really takes having cancer as her not being able to live at all and not go places and experience love or an actual life. I could understand where she was coming from though, I probably would not want to face the world and have everyone treat me different like I was a charity case. So if I was Hazel Lancaster, I would sit in my room all day, watch many seasons of Gossip Girl, 90210, or One Tree Hill and eat lots of Greater's Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream. But part of me would also realize, "I'm dying" and I need to do something with the rest of my life. I think Hazel realizes that when she meets Gus, the book obviously doesn't just come out and say it but I believe her character changes in the sense of wanting to do something with the time she has left. If she never would have met Gus at the support group, Hazel probably would have never gone to find the answers for An Imperial Affliction with him and would have never found love. For those of you who have not read this book, I do not want to ruin it for you so leave now and go read it!

The Fault In Our Stars

Last week after I rewatched the trailer for The Fault In Our Stars about 30 times, and decided that I might as well read the book because I loved the trailer and my friends keep telling me to just keep reading it. I started from the beginning instead or where I left off, and OH MY GOSH I LOVE IT! It is by far my favorite book because there is always something that happens next to keep the story alive. 

Hazel has cancer and doesn't know how much time she has left. But her mom thinks she is depressed because all she does is sit in her room her so she makes her go to this support group. At the support group she meets this guy named Augustus Waters and he also has cancer. Do they fall in love? Overall I would give the book a big 5 out of 5 stars  

Corrections

I was planning on doing a post sometime about rewriting a paragraph or two in my book, but I haven't found one that needed to be rewritten. Instead I have decided to share a very well written paragraph in "Project Popularity".

"I put a hand on her shoulder to cut her off, suppressing smile when I saw her face turn as red as a tomato. Strange how she wasn't afraid to give me a piece of her mind seconds ago yet when it came down to something as simply as a rub on her shoulder, she'd grow utterly self-conscious. Jamie Vanderviere was so full of contradictions."

In class we have been studying good writing craft, I think this paragraph would be a good example because of the words contradiction and utterly. This is a use of diction because utterly and contradiction are not usually words I use in my everyday vocabulary. In purple is a good use of a simile and figurative language, the author could have used another word other than tomato because it's a common everyday example and it is over used. For syntax, the second sentence is really long and I feel maybe the author could have have added more detail to the paragraph and made the sentences shorter.