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I am fully aware of John Green's current popularity. Yet after trying my hardest to read his books and enjoy them to the fullest, I was unfortunately unable to join the hype, and do not understand the reason for such overwhelming praise. After reading three of Green's books, and not being as satisfied as other readers were, I decided Paper Towns would either make it or break it for me. Well... it broke it for me.

How many times can an author write the same thing over and over again but with different words and names? It seems as if for the majority of his books, John Green uses a formula. An incredibly unrealistic girl + an incredibly unrealistic guy + funny/ridiculous side characters + an unrealistic/mediocre plot + jumbled and rushed metaphors and poetic phrases = $$$/success. Math rules.

An incredibly unrealistic girl:
You see, Margo Roth Spiegelman, a.k.a. Alaska, is nothing like you've ever seen before. She isn't just a girl, or a next door neighbor, or even a high school student; Margo is a miracle, an adventure, a mystery, a ninja, the greatest creation of all. The reader is constantly reminded of Margo's uniqueness and awesomeness and out of this world...ness...

Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.

Oh... awkward. Moving on. Margo was an unrealistic character. She constantly went against the system for no reason at all except to be written as "different". She continuously runs away and joins the circus and capitalizes letters in the middle of a word because she feels bad that they don't receive enough attention and leaves clues behind for people to find her and then gets mad when people do find her and doesn't care about school or family or people overall but cares only for her egocentric and self-absorbed self with no interest or concern for other people and how she impacts their daily lives and.... I need to breathe. It also didn't help that even though she wasn't even in 2/3 of the book, she still managed to somehow revolve the story around her.

An incredibly unrealistic guy:
Miles (Colin?) - ahem, I mean Quentin - is everything like you've ever seen before. He's just a guy. A guy who's social status isn't really on top, who is somewhat awkward and nerdy, and who is deeply in love with a seemingly unattainable girl. Oh, sorry, did I say deeply in love? I meant obsessed.

"That doesn't sound like my Margo," she said, and I thought of my Margo, and all of us looking at her reflection in different funhouse mirrors.

What bothered me most about Paper Towns (aside from Margo... no one beats Margo) was the fact that the reader was persistently being fed the lie that Quentin had been in love with Margo ever since they were children. Quentin's friendship with Margo during their childhood had been brief and they were never really friends after. He didn't know her as a person but instead saw her as a divine figure; a goddess. Quentin himself even asks, "Who is the real Margo?" The whole story is about Quentin solving the mystery of who the real Margo is rather than who she makes herself out to be or how people perceive her. I can understand that he was in love with the idea of her, but to genuinely love her? I simply didn't buy it. Quentin kissed the ground she walked on, slept on the ground she slept on (quite literally), and followed her every order. It was obsession, not love.

Funny/ridiculous side characters:
The side characters, mainly Ben and Radar, are truly what made me just keep swimming. I have to give John Green some credit; his side characters never fail to make me laugh. The ridiculousness of Ben and the overuse of the word 'hunnybunnies' as well as his adventures to the rise of his social status was entertaining. Radar's weird black Santa Claus filled-house made me giggle for no reason at all. The main reason I embraced Ben and Radar so easily was because they were a very needed relief from the Margo-orientated plot. It felt nice to take a break from Margo and focus on someone else.

Those of us who frequent the band room have long suspected that Becca maintains her lovely figure by eating nothing but the souls of kittens and the dreams of impoverished children.

A mediocre plot mixed with rushed metaphors:
Quentin and his friends embark on a journey to find the lost treasure, Margo, whom they must discover the mystery behind (but never really do in the end). And... that's pretty much it, aside from the metaphorical and philosophical mumbo jumbo the author feels the need to include but in truth is completely unnecessary and badly executed.

“Listen, kid. This is what happens: Somebody-girl usually-got a free spirit, doesn't get on too good with her parents. These kids, they're like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just fly away. And maybe you never see the balloon again. It lands in Canada or somethin', gets work at a restaurant, and before the balloon even notices, it's been pouring coffee in that same dinner to the same sad bastards for thirty years. Or maybe three or four years from now or three or four days from now, the prevailing winds take the balloon back home, because it needs money, or it sobered up, or it misses its kid brother. But listen, kid, that string gets cut all the time."

"Yeah, bu-"

"I'm not finished, kid. The thing about these balloons is that there are so goddamned many of them. The sky is choked full of them, rubbing up against one another as they float to here or from there, and every one of those damned balloons ends up on my desk, one way or another, and after awhile a man can get discouraged. Everywhere the balloons, and each of them with a mother and father, or God forbid both, and after a while, you can't even see'em individually. You look up at all the balloons in the sky and you can see all of the balloons, but you cannot see any one balloon.�

Well, that was a mouthful. And a very unnecessary one at that.

And now for the final product... Drum roll please.......
$$$$$$$$$$ Cha-ching!