Book Review| Looking For Alaska

Author Name: John Green

Book Description:

The author's definitive edition of this bestselling and award-winning debut novel.

Contains:

* a brand-new introduction from John Green

* never-before-seen passages from original manuscript

* a Q&A with the author, responding to fans' favourite questions Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words - and tired of his safe, boring and rather lonely life at home. He leaves for boarding school filled with cautious optimism, to seek what the dying poet Francois Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps." Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young.

Clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy, Alaska will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps. Looking for Alaska brilliantly chronicles the indelible impact one life can have on another. It is poignant, funny, heartbreaking and compelling.

My Review: I read this book only after The Fault in our Stars because I loved it. I was totally unbiased regarding what this is going to be like. And frankly speaking I loved this book too. The best part of this book is good characterization. Seriously guys the way characters has been introduced and described, you can relate to them really well. Especially Miles. He was such a shy and socially awkward person who gets out of his comfort zone. I really liked how I as a reader can relate to him. He was such a sweet person. Not only the major characters but I liked the characterization of Colonel and Lara as well.

Alaska's character is very complex and intriguing as she has been shown as an emotionally unstable girl.

The ending part is the best. It has an open ending giving readers the scope of interpreting what he/she wants. We don't know whether Alaska commits suicide because of the guilt of forgetting her dead mom's birthday or she actually dies from the car accident.

The whole book can be somehow summed up in a few lines which occurs in the book itself.

"You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."

Yes this book is a labyrinth too.

Taking into consideration the fact that, Looking for Alaska is John Green's debut piece, I was totally impressed and it sets a high standard. It is not just a love story but something more than that.

(She said, "It's not life or death, the labyrinth."

"Um, okay. So what is it?"

"Suffering," she said. "Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?... Nothing's wrong. But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.)- Looking for Alaska

Totally recommended.

Ratings: 4/5