Paper Towns Summary
Paper Towns is a novel by John Green in which Quentin Jacobsen follows a series of clues to discover the whereabouts of his missing childhood friend, Margo.
- Childhood friends Quentin and Margo gradually drift apart. However, a few weeks before graduation, Margo asks Quentin to help her enact a series of pranks.
- The next morning, Quentin goes to talk to Margo only to discover that she has gone missing. He finds a series of clues as to her whereabouts.
- Quentin and his friends travel to New York to find Margo. However, upon arriving, Quentin discovers that Margo did not want to be found.
Summary
John Green’s Paper Towns, published by Dutton Juvenile in 2008, is a novel that plays off earlier themes in his works Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines.
Quentin Jacobsen is a seventeen-year-old living in an Orlando-area high
school. He has been in love with his childhood best friend, Margo, his entire
life. Quentin is an intelligent boy and Margo has a reputation for being tough
and cool. When they were nine years old, he and Margo shared a discovery that
changed their lives forever. While walking through a park, they found a man
named Robert Joyner who had killed himself. Since that night, he and Margo went
separate ways. Fortunately, Quentin’s parents are therapists and other than
that tragedy long ago, Quentin has lived a balanced and well-adjusted life with
few risks and little drama.
A few weeks before high school graduation, Margo appears at Quentin’s window in
the middle of the night. She asks him to accompany her on an all-nighter of
pranks. Margo is on a litany of revenge that includes spray paint, blackmail,
and breaking into Sea World. Quentin thinks that this night will bring he and
Margo together again as friends. However, Margo runs away after their
adventures.
Quentin turns to his friends Radar and Ben, and to Margo’s friend, Lacy, for
help in an attempt to find her. They eventually skip their high school
graduation and go on a cross-country trip to find or “save her.” Margo has left
clues in a volume of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in the hopes that
he will find her. Along the way, Quentin realizes that Margo is not really the
person that he thought he knew.
Reviewers note Green’s deft hand describing the social challenges of the
culture in this part of Florida with its heat, overdevelopment, and
temptations. Margo’s description of their town as “a paper town” is an apt
metaphor: she describes a paper town as one with cul-de-sacs and streets that
turn into themselves and houses that are meant to fall apart. Critics admire
Green's memorable and unusual characters in this slice of Florida life.
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