[LM_NET] BOOK: Looking for Alaska by Green

["Anthony C. Doyle" <tdoyle@MUHSD.K12.CA.US>]

_Looking for Alaska_ by John Green

This is, I think, one of the best teen novels of the year, maybe the 
last several years.  I enjoyed every page of it.  The protagonist, Miles 
Halter, has no real friends and is bored with his Florida high school 
and the rest of his life.  He talks his parents into allowing him to 
attend a boarding school in Birmingham, Alabama, his father’s alma 
mater.  He goes to seek what the French poet Rabelais called a “Great 
Perhaps.”  And find it he does.

His roommate is the eccentric and brilliant Chip.  Chip has, well, a 
chip on his shoulder.  Being a poor, scholarship student, he hates the 
“Weekday Warriors”, rich preppies who go home on the weekends (even 
though he dates one).  He lives to pull pranks on them.  His 
coconspirator and best friend is Alaska Young.  Miles, like many other 
boys, falls in love with Alaska.  She is beautiful, wild, impulsive, and 
conflicted.

Through the course of the novel Miles develops close friendships with 
Chip and Alaska and the three wreak havoc as they seek revenge on the 
Weekday Warriors.  Miles also learns what lies behind Alaska’s 
unpredictable and sometimes self-destructive behavior.

Chapter titles (“136 Days Before”, “Four Days Before”, etc.) and Miles’ 
obsession with famous last words foreshadow Alaska’s demise and the 
devastation left in her wake.  Miles, Chip and Alaska are all flawed yet 
sympathetic characters, and all are authentically drawn.  The anguish 
and guilt the two boys suffer is heart-breakingly believable.  The 
ending, with its loose strings, is satisfying and realistic.

CAVEAT: smoking, drinking, and s@xual situations make this a 
high-school-and-above book.  I wouldn't recommend it for jr. high or for 
immature teens.

-- 
----
Tony Doyle, Librarian
Livingston High School, Livingston, CA
tdoyle@muhsd.k12.ca.us
<Http://www.lhs.muhsd.k12.ca.us/library/index.htm>
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.  Just get
people to stop reading them."-- Ray Bradbury

"One of the standard problems with the universe is that it's large 
enough that unlikely things happen pretty often."--Nigel Sharp, U.S. 
National Science Foundation

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