Title: Looking for Alaska
Author: John Green
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 272
Rating: 7/10
This is my second John Green book, after The Fault in Our Stars, and I have to say that I wasn’t particularly impressed. It was an okay read, and edited and formatted to a professional standard, but I found it to be predictable at times and almost more of a character study in a bunch of characters that I didn’t really care about, rather than an epic novel with a mind-blowing story line.
Still, for what it was, it was decent enough, and I’m still glad that I read it if only because I can now say that I did so. And it won’t put me off reading any the author’s other work – I mean, it’s easy-to-read, it’s just not quite as deep as I was hoping for. For me, it’s a little bit like Dan Brown – his books may feel formulaic at times, but you can’t deny that they’re competent.
From John Green, though, I was hoping for a little more, some sort of magic that felt like it was missing. I set my expectations too high, and I also have a feeling that if I was ten years younger, I would’ve thought more highly of it. But then, I’d have less to compare it to.
Either way, one of the good things about this book is that it doesn’t take long to read, and at less than 300 pages with large print and lots of spacing, it’s not going to take you forever to get through it. So there’s that.