I got 23 pages into this stink-bomb of a novel and had to put it down. This is exceedingly rare for me, but it's just that bad.



Our hero, Miles Halter, is a weird, spoiled kid who likes reading the ends of biographies just to get people's last words. He doesn't always even read the whole book, just the ending. Miles thinks this habit makes him deep. Miles is wrong.



We know Miles is shallow from page 3. He's leaving his public school for a fancy boarding school, and only two friends, Marie and Will

I got 23 pages into this stink-bomb of a novel and had to put it down. This is exceedingly rare for me, but it's just that bad.Our hero, Miles Halter, is a weird, spoiled kid who likes reading the ends of biographies just to get people's last words. He doesn't always even read the whole book, just the ending. Miles thinks this habit makes him deep. Miles is wrong.We know Miles is shallow from page 3. He's leaving his public school for a fancy boarding school, and only two friends, Marie and Will, show up to bid him adieu. Miles does not appreciate this gesture because Marie and Will are dorks, theater geeks, and they like, which Miles has somehow never heard of but already knows he doesn't like. Also, Will is fat. The horror.Luckily for Miles, he is soon to escape this hellish existence of being forced to socialize with overweight people who don't recoil like demons at the name of Jesus. At his fancy-pants school, he meets Chip "The Colonel" his jerk of a roommate, but Chip's alright because he looks like "a scale model of Adonis" and he smokes.Then there's Takumi, who's Asian and talks with his mouth full. So far, that is all we know about Takumi, and I have a horrible feeling that that is all we will ever know about Takumi.And then there's Alaska Young- "the hottest girl in the world" who introduces herself to Miles by gleefully recounting how she got groped by a random, randy boy over the summer. Alaska is like Miles in that she loves to read (a word which here means "parse, but pretend to have read the whole thing") big nonfiction books. Usually girls who like this kind of reading don't boast about their sexual exploits, because they are mature enough not to have any. They also don't drink, smoke, or partake of drugs.But to paraphrase Gandalf at the edge of Mirkwood, this is the John Green-verse, a world that onlysimilar to ours, and we're in for all kinds of fun wherever we go.Chip gives Miles the nickname "Pudge" because Miles is skinny. Green clearly expects us all to be rolling in the aisles over this one. Green's expectations are way off.The night before school begins, Miles gets abducted from his room while Chip is out. The boys who take him make him a duct tape mummy and throw him in a pond, an ordeal which he miraculously survives. These three guys tried to murder him, but they were thin and attractive and didn't say anything about Jesus, so we're cool.I neither know nor care what happens after this point. From what I've heard, Miles and Alaska make out, despite each already having a girlfriend/boyfriend, and Miles receives a sexual favor of the Bill Clinton variety from his girlfriend while Alaska looks on and gives the girl instructions. Then Alaska goes drunk-driving and dies, prompting an existential crisis on the part of her friends, who wonder if the car crash was a purposeful suicide.They market this book to kids as young as twelve.John Green is not a particularly good writer, despite what you might have heard. His prose isn't bad, but it's hardly the ambrosial poetry it's been marketed as. The supposedly deep thoughts of the kids are clearly tacked on - it's not natural for Alaska to go from "OMG he honked my boob" (her words, not mine) to "General Bolivar wondered 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?'" Every time Miles mentioned his Great Perhaps, I wanted to clobber someone. Nobody on Earth thinks, acts, or talks like this.Green clearly fancies himself a great sage of adolescence, and his characters worthy to keep the company of the best YA protagonists. What he doesn't realize is that the great characters are great because they're not sold to the reader as perfect; rather, they are shown to be real kids with flaws and virtues. A few examples:-Huck Finn () is a gritty protagonist, but truly gritty, not some pampered rich kid affecting a hard life to evade moral responsibility. Huck is a weather-worn, stained pair of workman's jeans, while Miles Halter and Company are the $425 Nordstrom jeans splattered with fake mud.-Jo March (), like Green's characters, is a bookworm who yearns for more adventure than her small town can provide. But unlike them, she learns the value of temperance, sacrifice, and humility.-Anne Shirley () is superficially a lot like a Green character, a precocious reader who loves to show off her big vocabulary and Deep Thoughts. But unlike Green's nihilistic dramatis personae, Anne believes fervently in Goodness - not just in God, while that's big, but in the inherent potential of every human being. She also recognizes her mistakes and learns from them.-Eustace Clarence Scrubb has a lot of Greenish tics. He collects bugs, and he could probably have a good conversation with Miles and Alaska about famous last words and grain elevators. Eustace looks down on his cousins the Pevensies, whom he perceives as stupid, and he keeps a journal, wherein he is the only smart or sane person in a sea of idiots who enjoy the outdoors and talk about Aslan (Christ Superstar). Eustace basically is a Green hero at the start of, but Lewis sees him as he is - utterly insufferable. What a pity no one could turn Miles Halter into a dragon; it might have been a character-building experience.-Scout Finch () is extremely observant and intelligent, but unlike a Green kid, never puts on airs about it. She never even really recognizes how different she is from the children around her. She's nine when the story ends, but she's far more mature than Miles or any of his friends.- Meg Murray () is a brainiac who looks and acts like one - a mousy-haired, bespectacled dork with no discernible social life, whose best friend is her (autism spectrum?) little brother. She doesn't degrade the people around her. She just wants to save her family.(The last two examples are from a movie and a TV show, but they're still light-years ahead of anybody in a Green book).- Sarah Williams () fancies herself a genius, who's so much better than her peers that she'd rather do one-person plays in the park than interact with other high school kids. She quickly learns that she's not nearly as grown-up as she thought she was, and that by living mentally in a fantasy world, she almost lost her baby brother and got embroiled in a relationship with a rather unstable man that neither she nor he was ready for. Sarah becomes mature when she admits her immaturity. Green's people don't think they have anything to learn.- the entire main cast ofare strange, maladjusted, and alienated from the mainstream like Green's kids are - but in realistic ways. Some of them are drug-addled partiers, others are readers and perceivers. The writers of the show understood that a wild girl like Kim Kelly, who boasts of her Maenadish adventures just like Alaska, would not enjoy reading, while a bright kid like Lindsay Weir would try pot and skipping school, but feel the whole time like she was betraying herself. Green just amalgamates incompatible personality traits without a shred of realism.That's not even getting into the zig-zagging language of the book. Green drops heavy swear words frequently, but thinks the reader needs every bit of real information spelled out for them. At the end of chapter 1, Miles explains to his parents who Francois Rabelais was, despite the fact that. This unnatural dialogue reveals how dumb Green thinks his readers are.It would have been better for Miles-as-narrator to step away from the scene and explain Rabelais briefly to the reader. Alcott, Montgomery, Lewis, L'Engle or Lee would have just had him say "As Rabelais said on his deathbed..." and leave it to the reader to find out who Rabelais was. Believe it or not, kids, there was a time when novelists knew you were smart enough to use an encyclopedia!And what of the gratuitous crudity and innuendo in this book? Alaska is utterly objectified. The first time we meet her, she's bragging about getting felt up. To a pair of boys, no less, one of whom she doesn't even know. When she's having a supposedly deep conversation by the pond with Miles, he's more focused on her curves, which he describes over and over again in detail, than in anything she's saying. It's the Male Gaze Run Amok.I understand that men are easily distracted by the bodies of women, especially women as beautiful as we're told Alaska is. But Miles is so filled with lust for her that it's uncomfortable to read about. If I have to read about men looking at women and being horny, I'll stick with Ovid. He can get disgusting, but he's a far superior writer to Green in any translation, and at least in Ovid many of the women do not seek to be objectified. I'll take Apollo/Daphne over Miles/Alaska any day. Also,boasts such niceties as symbolism, flashes of genuine humor, and explosions.All in all, this is a terrible book which somehow won awards and gained its author a huge, worshipful following. He has since rewritten it many times, changing the characters' names and tweaking the subject matter slightly. All his books pretend to be profound when they're really just paeans to narcissism, nihilism, and bad decisions. His fans gobble this stuff up because it makes them feel special and unique without challenging them to change their lives or examine their characters.Worse, Green's genre can be a slippery slope to other "profound" YA novels such as the potentially harmful, which in light of its alarmingly popular Netflix adaptation will soon be getting a review from me.In short, don't give this man your money, time or brain cells.