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** spoiler alert ** First off, I didn’t like the book very much!
I thought the main characters to be either in no way likeable (Margo) or completely void of a personality of their own (Quentin).

But mostly I thought it to be too badly written and plotted for the praise it received. Although, that the plot wouldn’t hold up for me got already foreshadowed when I had the hardest time to suspend my disbelieve over the prologue, which so hardly matters to the story at hand that I wonder why he put it in there at all, so I guess I can’t really claim to have been let down here. After this weak beginning the book is going up and down, becomes partly funny, even witty at times, and completely pointless, bordering on being boring, at larger parts.
A major problem that I had with Green’s writing, besides featuring a heavily contrived plot that finds no direction during the first hundred pages, is that all his characters use, like, the same speech pattern and the things he has them say sound more than once extremely fabricated. You can practically see the wheels spinning in the authors mind, while reading the story. It also irked me what a blatant discrepancy there is between the characters given age and the mental maturity they express through out the book, this just didn’t go together anywhere for me.



SPOILER AREA!

The plot is troubled, to say the least.
We follow Q stumble through a slew of convenient chance encounters while he tries to follow clues left by “his beloved� Margo. A search for a person of which every other character in the book long since realised that she’s the kind of completely self-absorbed person that constantly thinks the world was supposed to revolve around her. The eponymous strings she talks about in the first part are only the strings she plays in order to try and get others to react to her as she wishes. Why then, you may ask, would Q believe to be in love with her? Short answer: he isn’t. He is, as is clearly shown early on, only in love with her body, while he has, interestingly as the only person in the book, not the trace of a clue who she actually might be. The real mystery within the book was for me why his friends put up with his constant whining and claims that he loved Margo oh so much. Though, this at least is a constant trait in his character, and when he later on claims in front of Margo that he feared her dead, one has to wonder if maybe Q finally learned to stop being a puppet and makes his first feeble attempts at playing the strings himself, because the only person ever to show any real concern for Margo is her friend Lacey. Where in probably lays the true reason for Margo’s anger with her, it’s not the occasional lack of tact expressed by Lace, but the fact that Lace is the honest caring person that Margo can only wish that she could be.

END SPOILER AREA!