Looking for Alaska

5 Responses to “Looking for Alaska”

1. P. O'Donnell says:

   June 25, 2010 at 3:14 pm

   (This is Pat O’Donnell’s daughter, not Pat O’Donnell.)
   
   Drinking, drugs, sex, juvenile delinquency, drunk driving…these are all things you can find addressed in any public service announcement, health class, and many additional sources. So why write a novel about them? Maybe the leader of Looking for Alaska, John Green, felt a personal tie with these problems, a strong desire to show teens the dangers of what is now thought of as normal teenage behavior. Or maybe he thought that all of the public service announcements and health classes didn’t take up these “problems” well enough. John Green uses a classic example from what he considers to be an average teen’s life to warn kids of the dangers of driving under the influence and all-purpose teenage delinquency. In this, the leader has succeeded, as well as any health class or all-purpose warning mark on a six-pack of beer does. Why not read one of persons?
   
   The answer is that John Green tries to tell this problem more closely to an average teen reading this book. Looking for Alaska tells the tale of a boy, “Pudge,” who transfers to a new school to get away from his dull life. While he’s there, he meets lots of new and appealing friends, including the charismatic and self-destructive Alaska. “Normal” teenage delinquency ensues, climaxing in Alaska crashing her car while under the influence and dying. Now Pudge and his friends need to find the answers to some unsolved questions Alaska left behind. In order to make this tale, John Green, develops strong, familiar characters, with appealing quirks. “Pudge,” for example, is the familiar stock character of the awkward new kid, unsure and clumsy. John Green makes Pudge stand out from the additional characters in additional books of this type (there are so many) by giving him personality quirks–such as the fact that he memorizes legendary people’s last words. This makes him memorable, yet still simple to tell to for an average teenager.
   
   The leader’s intentions in writing this book are understandable–he wishes to make teens aware of the problem that is teenage delinquency and the disasters it can cause. But, this has been done so many more times, in so many additional ways, that this book is all but obsolete.
   Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
2. Donna Coffeen says:

   June 25, 2010 at 5:33 pm

   Due to the sections where the 2 main characters (male and female) are watching porn movies together and the comments she makes to instruct the teen boy and the sections on their rather graphic sexual experiences together, this book is VERY inappropriate for a school HS library. Language is also crude.
   Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
3. Dana C. Ahmad says:

   June 25, 2010 at 8:02 pm

   I was so disappointed in this book. I reflect I might have been able to deal with the contents of the tale more easily if the characters had been a bit older. I didn’t like to read about such young people dealing with all the sex and drinking. Maybe I am really out of the loop on how things are, but I just didn’t get into this tale at all. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone I know to read.
   Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
4. D. Brown says:

   June 25, 2010 at 8:34 pm

   Looking for Alaska is a boarding school tale with many stock features of such tales. The action revolves around pranks, dread of expulsion, and the fantastic evil in all boarding school tales: ratting. The tale culminates with the death of a central character, Alaska, and the problem of coming to terms with her death is the central conflict faced by the protagonist. Indeed, the high point of the book is the extended denouement from which the title comes and in which the protagonist and his friends struggle to come to terms with their own support and guilt in Alaska’s death. Sorry to say, to say that this is the best the book has to offer is not to say much. What passes for resolution turns out to be yet another boarding school prank. The most fitting tribute to her memory that Alaska’s friends can muster is to smuggle a male stripper into the school, and somehow Green wants us to reflect that the appearance of the stripper is an appropriate catharsis for the melodrama of grief and guilt that he has described. In any case the protagonists are all left feeling reasonably excellent about themselves and lacking, rumor has it that, having learned much. Green’s novel might be called a bildungsroman, except that there is small sign of growing wisdom or maturity. If this was all, the book would be a yawn, and adolescent boys would find it as dreary as all their additional required reading. But it turns out Green has more to offer. The most appealing feature of the book, and its real selling point, is sex. Much of this comes in the form of adolescent sexual fantasies. The protagonist becomes skilled, for example, at counting the layers of clothing separating him from whatever young woman happens to be next to him, and he is distant with sex throughout the book. This growing obsession reaches a climax in the protagonist’s first experience of oral sex, a scene which is depicted graphically. While the protagonist experiences seventh heaven it is hard to see what the poor girl is getting out of this experience, especially when the protagonist promptly dumps her. It is a truely Clintonesque scene. There are, of course, no consequences. No HPV. No emotional fall out. In Green’s world substance abuse sometimes has serious consequences, but sex has no fee tag. (Ed. Sex has a Fee Tag is the title of an brilliant sex ed video which provides a fitting counterpoint to Green’s book) No doubt fifteen year olds will eat this stuff up. It is the ideal reinforcement for the normal follies of adolescence. Green pushes all the right buttons for teenage readers. But is this kind of pandering the best we can offer? There is one final character worth mentioning, the sage of the tale, Doctor Hyde. Doctor Hyde teaches religion and he earns the respect of his students because he does not patronize them. He knows they need wisdom, and he knows where it is to be establish – not in the fads of the moment, but in time-tested classics. In his particular case this means learning from the fantastic religious traditions, and the fantastic classics of religious literature. One could only wish that Green had learned from his own character. Green panders, he titillates, he lowers his work to the level of his adolescent audience. Green is no Dr. Hyde, and his novel conveys precious small wisdom. In brief, I find Green’s novel offhand and explicit in its treatment of adolescent sexuality and substance abuse, transparently designed to titillate adolescent boys, and both egregious and hypocritical in its objectification of young women. Stay away.

   Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
5. Joey McFarland says:

   June 25, 2010 at 11:24 pm

   This book is fantastic! It was in excellent shape when I got it, except for some sicker residue on the front take in.
   Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5