Paper Towns

I have just finished reading Paper Towns, by John Green and it was every bit as beautiful as I had expected it to be. It was heart-breakingly beautiful, bitter-sweetly beautiful, inspiring-ly beautiful and even heart-warming-ly beautiful.

It was, in a lot of ways, quite similar to Looking For Alaska, which was John's first book, but that's okay- more than okay, actually, that's good, really good because Looking For Alaska is one of favourite books for so, so many reasons, and Paper Towns shares these reasons.

What I want to really write about though, is the end of the book. If you plan on reading it, this will spoil both Paper Towns and Looking For Alaska, so turn back now, because I'm sure as hell not stopping.

The end of the book, from when Q and the others find Margo to the very end was, to say the least, thought provoking. Emotion provoking too, but I don't quite know if that's a usable phrase. Margo and Q have this big fight, which unsettled me, because, I realised, I shared Q's idea of Margo and even though I'm sure I knew deep down that Margo would not be Q's idea of Margo, I still wanted her to be. He loved her and so did I and so we both wanted her to be the Margo that he had not quite created in his head, but was still not accurate.

So they fight and then they talk about everything that had happened and things are cleared and explained and made sense- and yet, the actual plot mystery is not what I want cleared up.

And then comes more of the ending, beginning with this:
"She stares at me, her eyes and my eyes and nothing between them. I have nothing to gain from kissing her. But I am no longer looking to gain anything."
That is the type of beautiful that this book is.

The last paragraph, is a long paragraph, which really has few little paragraphs in it, but I'm not sure what one would call it and that's not important right now anyway. It did not make me cry, really, it just made my eyes well up. Q stands and watches Margo leave, thinking about what is happening and Margo is standing with her back to him but has not yet left and all I want is for Q to run to her and hug her and say goodbye again, but he doesn't. Instead, Margo turns back to him and "the physical space between [them] evaporates. We play the broken strings of our instruments one last time." And so, they kiss again, in the dark with their eyes open and it's bitter-sweetly beautiful and this is why I'm crying and then after they kiss, they rest their foreheads together, which makes me cry for a whole other reason, and then Q
"can see her almost perfectly in this cracked darkness."
and then it ends.

Because it ends here, maybe I could imagine that Margo stays and goes home with Q, but I know that she doesn't. I know she is kissing him goodbye but the likelihood is that even though Q is Q and not Miles (from Looking For Alaska) and even though Margo is Margo, and not Alaska and also not dead, Q will always love Margo Roth Spigelman, his crooked neighbour with all his crooked heart.

There is plenty more to be said about this book and plenty more than I have thought about- but this is all I want to say about it for now.

Merry Christmas to everyone. My friends have all gotten me the loveliest of gifts and they are all beautiful and make me happy- but I cannot go without mentioning Dom, who, in his in infinite loveliness, got my NaNoWriMo novel printed and bound and wrote the best foreward to any book that ever was and ever shall be.

Love,
Cíara.