Title: Looking for Alaska
Author: John Green
Publisher: Dutton Books, 160 pages
Copyright: 2005
Copyright: 2005
Summary:
Plot: Sixteen year old Miles moves from Florida to Alabama to attend boarding school. This is a coming of age story about Miles's adventures and misadventures at Culver Creek Academy.
Major Characters: Miles "Pudge" Halter, Alaska Young, Chip "Colonel" Martin
Major Subjects: Coming-of-Age, Romance, Boarding School
Plot: Sixteen year old Miles moves from Florida to Alabama to attend boarding school. This is a coming of age story about Miles's adventures and misadventures at Culver Creek Academy.
Major Characters: Miles "Pudge" Halter, Alaska Young, Chip "Colonel" Martin
Major Subjects: Coming-of-Age, Romance, Boarding School
School Library Journal Review:
Gr 9 Up: From the very first page, tension fills John Green's Michael L. Printz Award-winning novel (Dutton, 2005). Miles Halter, 16, is afraid that nobody will show up at his party because he doesn't have many friends. He loves to read biographies and discover the last words attributed to famous people. He's particularly intrigued with the dying words of poet Francois Rabelais: "I go to seek a great perhaps." Miles is leaving his loving Florida home for the "great perhaps" of the same Alabama boarding school attended by his father. Ominous chapter headings (40 days before, 10 days after) reveal that something tragic may happen. At school, Miles is accepted by a brainy group of pranksters led by his roommate and Alaska Young, a smart and sexy feminist. The teen becomes captivated by his new friends who spend as much energy on sex, smoking, drinking, and cutting-up as they do on reading, learning, and searching for life's meaning. As the school year progresses, Miles's crush on Alaska intensifies, even after it becomes evident that her troubled past sometimes causes her to be self-destructive. This novel is about real kids dealing with the pressures of growing up and feeling indestructible. Listeners will be riveted as the friends band together to deal with the catastrophic events that plague their junior year, and rejoice at their triumphs. Jeff Woodman clearly delineates the voices for each character in an age-appropriate, smart-alecky manner, injecting great emotion while managing not to be overly sentimental. This story belongs in all collections for older young adults, especially those who like Chris Crutcher, David Klass, and Terry Trueman.
Gr 9 Up: From the very first page, tension fills John Green's Michael L. Printz Award-winning novel (Dutton, 2005). Miles Halter, 16, is afraid that nobody will show up at his party because he doesn't have many friends. He loves to read biographies and discover the last words attributed to famous people. He's particularly intrigued with the dying words of poet Francois Rabelais: "I go to seek a great perhaps." Miles is leaving his loving Florida home for the "great perhaps" of the same Alabama boarding school attended by his father. Ominous chapter headings (40 days before, 10 days after) reveal that something tragic may happen. At school, Miles is accepted by a brainy group of pranksters led by his roommate and Alaska Young, a smart and sexy feminist. The teen becomes captivated by his new friends who spend as much energy on sex, smoking, drinking, and cutting-up as they do on reading, learning, and searching for life's meaning. As the school year progresses, Miles's crush on Alaska intensifies, even after it becomes evident that her troubled past sometimes causes her to be self-destructive. This novel is about real kids dealing with the pressures of growing up and feeling indestructible. Listeners will be riveted as the friends band together to deal with the catastrophic events that plague their junior year, and rejoice at their triumphs. Jeff Woodman clearly delineates the voices for each character in an age-appropriate, smart-alecky manner, injecting great emotion while managing not to be overly sentimental. This story belongs in all collections for older young adults, especially those who like Chris Crutcher, David Klass, and Terry Trueman.
Review:
This is a book about the big things that happen to us: love, loss, grief, forgiveness.
Looking for Alaska is a Printz Award Winner, so I was expecting something with a little more "ummph" to it, but I didn't find that in this book. It's a very well-written novel, but there's no punch; instead, the novel seems to drag on and on and on and on and on.
This is a book about the big things that happen to us: love, loss, grief, forgiveness.
Looking for Alaska is a Printz Award Winner, so I was expecting something with a little more "ummph" to it, but I didn't find that in this book. It's a very well-written novel, but there's no punch; instead, the novel seems to drag on and on and on and on and on.
Once Miles arrives at Culver Creek boarding school in Alabama, he is taken under the wing of his roommate Chip, otherwise known as the Colonel, a dirt-poor genius on a scholarship who spends his spare time coming up with extravagant plans to bring down the uber-rich preppies of their school. Chip quickly creates a fitting nickname for scrawny Miles, Pudge.
Miles, or Pudge, meets kids his age that he would never imagine being friends with back at home. His roommate, the Colonel; Takumi, the Japanese whizz kid; Lara, the shy, but beautiful Romanian, and the crazy wild child he can’t keep his mind off of, Alaska. Being the leader of the group, Alaska is an outgoing, flirty, fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants girl who doesn’t go by the rules. All three characters are presented as if they are wise beyond their years, but high school drama, intensified by boarding school highs and lows, transforms them bad-ass. As the novel progresses, Miles’s feelings for Alaska become stronger and stronger, but Jake, her boyfriend, is the only thing holding Miles back from expressing how he feels.
Miles, or Pudge, meets kids his age that he would never imagine being friends with back at home. His roommate, the Colonel; Takumi, the Japanese whizz kid; Lara, the shy, but beautiful Romanian, and the crazy wild child he can’t keep his mind off of, Alaska. Being the leader of the group, Alaska is an outgoing, flirty, fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants girl who doesn’t go by the rules. All three characters are presented as if they are wise beyond their years, but high school drama, intensified by boarding school highs and lows, transforms them bad-ass. As the novel progresses, Miles’s feelings for Alaska become stronger and stronger, but Jake, her boyfriend, is the only thing holding Miles back from expressing how he feels.
The novel is divided into two sections, "Before" and "After", so readers can expect a major event to happen in the second section. The event shakes up Miles, Chip, and the entire school.
It's hard to see this book as young adult fiction because it reads like Miles is looking back on it years later. It is written in first person past tense and the voice of Miles is so mature, so self-aware that it is hard to believe a sixteen year-old telling the tale of his own coming of age with such effortless aplomb.
Green spends more time on Miles’s inner spiritual life using his world religions class as a foil for what is happening to him. Miles’s monologues can be dense and philosophical and, again, feel too sophisticated for a boy who counts layers of clothing and drinks milk and vodka. (On the other hand, many YA novels have a character whose actions on the outside contradict their mature and thoughtful internal feelings.) His narrative is jumping with self-deprecating humor and teenage struggle to be truthful and to still maintain the facade of coolness that they project.
Favorite Lines: "It's not because I want to make out with her." Hold on." He grabbed a pencil and scrawled excitedly at the paper as if he'd just made a mathematical breakthrough and then looked back up at me. "I just did some calculations, and I've been able to determine that you're full of shit"
Reading Level: Intermediate
Notes about Audience: Recommended for readers in high school, ages 15 and up.
Other books by John Green:
You might also enjoy:
King Dork by Frank Portman
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Absolute Brightness by James Lecesne
Spud by John Van de Ruit
