John Green’s “Looking for Alaska:”

Will the Search Ever End

Reviewed by Josh Hanna

The complex journey of a young adult growing up after hopelessly falling for the love of his life is what “Looking for Alaska” leads us through. Innocence is lost, as responsibility and hardship with our own emotion comes to light in this romantic drama in one boy’s coming of age.

Looking for Alaska tells the tale of a teenage Miles Halter through a year of boarding school in Alabama. Excited, yet nervous from his new surrounding, Miles meets Chip “Colonel“ Martin and they become best friends. Colonel is daring and adventurous, but invokes heavy drinking and drug use into his lifestyle. Following the Colonel’s footsteps, Miles quickly loses himself to the intoxicating lifestyle as he lets go and learns how to drink, smoke and escape punishment. Soon in, Miles is introduced to the intelligent and equally gorgeous and gifted Alaska, eventually falling for her. Yet, his conscience is broken along with his heart after Alaska dies driving home after drinking with Colonel and him.

I thought this book was a very good read, given the circumstances of the romantic genre. While I am not one to read books in this genre, I found “Looking for Alaska” set aside from the unoriginal, cheesy, and lame teen romance novel plaguing the market today. While it heavily contains the descriptive nature romance novels seem to invoke, the book also spoke about the hardships of growing up. I personally felt like this spoke to me, and I felt that John Green wrote the book and truly understood and effectively conveyed not only Mile’s falling in love and inevitable heartbreak, but the desire and consequences to his rebellion. The personal depth Green puts into Mile’s character, I found to be very real, as he writes, “People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to” (100). The initial denial of Alaska’s death, to the boy’s grieving, to their search for evidence of suicide, followed by the process of Miles losing his innocence, is the depth and emotion Green so greatly revolves the story around.

Also, what I thought was most interesting was the poetic language of the book. “So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.” (88); similes “like a North Carolina tobacco field in a wildfire” (56) exemplify the beautiful language of John Green. Both not only captured the thoughts and emotion I valued so much in the book, but they were worded in a way which I felt was intelligent and lyrical even. Additionally, there was the pre accident and post accident structure of the book, which constantly kept me reading on to fill in the blanks. I felt this was an elegant way to structure the story, and broke it off from just another boring book.

While the novel is linguistically beautiful and the story was far from the typical cheesy romance novels, I still found certain parts of it to be a bit too much for me. With all of John Green’s powerful ways with words, and the story told, sometimes, ideas presented in the story was simply too abstract, and I felt like I was missing something. Finally, I found myself frustrated at certain times in the book from the characters being a bit too melodramatic about the mundane.

Overall, I found this book to be a great read and spoke to me in many different ways. I enjoyed following the life of Miles and truly heard his love and pain in the story. It was a great story of growing up and never losing hope no matter the situation, and that sometimes us being imperfect is okay.