When I read The Fault in Our Stars this time last year, I felt broken in a really beautiful way. I loved that the book moved me so much, and decided that I understood all the hype for John Green. When I finished Looking for Alaska a month later, I felt extremely disappointed, and realised a lot of the flaws in TFIOS that I hadn't noticed the first time around. Reading Paper Towns, I felt like I was in the middle of those two emotions. 
 Paper Towns begins with a prologue. Quentin - or Q, as his friends call him - is recalling the day that he and his neighbour and childhood friend, Margo Roth Spiegelman, discovered a body in the local park. After the prologue, the story picks up near the end of their senior year in high school. We go through what seems to be a normal day for Quentin - running late in the morning, going through his classes, and admiring Margo from a distance, as their friendship disappeared with the onset of puberty. This day is anything but normal, however, as late that night, Margo appears at his bedroom window for the first time in years. She recruits him for a night of playing very elaborate pranks on her cheating boyfriend and fake friends, then breaking in to SeaWorld. Q goes to sleep a few hours before he needs to wake up with the idea that she will be his friend again in the morning, but the next day, Margo is missing, and the mystery begins. 
 I think what really appealed to me in this book was the enigma that was Margo Roth Spiegelman, which makes me feel like a bit of a douche, somehow. I loved the mystery that she had laid out, and I loved discovering the clues with Q, and experiencing his search for her. I feel a little like a douche, because one of the main themes of this book is that people are people, despite the fact that we see them more as characters in our lives. A lot of the time, we are imagining them as something else, rather than seeing them for who they are. I was intrigued by Margo's character and disappearance, and it was wonderful to discover her alongside Q, but I'm not sure I enjoyed the ending as much as I'd expected to. It certainly didn't end the way I had expected, which, now that I think about it, might be the whole point. 
 I have a weird relationship with John Green novels. One one hand, I think he's a skilled writer, and that he can write teenagers in a way that is honest and believable. On the other hand, his characters can blend together from book to book (while there are some differences between the characters, Quentin and Margo are annoyingly similar to Miles and Alaska from Looking for Alaska), and while he writes believable dialogue most of the time, it's hard to take a novel seriously when a seventeen year-old begins monologuing near the end of the novel, especially when it sounds like they've written fourteen drafts of their speech and practised for hours beforehand. It was during this monologue, which occurs in the last chapter of the book, that I realised I hadn't really been enjoying the ending. 
 The whole book took me on a journey, it made me want to keep turning the pages, even when I was falling asleep. At the end, though, I was reading for the answers, and they weren't as satisfying as the journey had been. This point reiterates that John Green is an excellent writer, at least in my mind, as it seems that is another huge theme in the story. In that first night with Margo, after they break into SeaWorld, she tells Q that breaking into places never feels as good as she thinks it will - that the real enjoyment comes from the planning. We're not planning anything as we read through Q's frantic search for Margo, but it is where the real enjoyment comes from. 
 Even though I wasn't too thrilled with the ending, Paper Towns was a really enjoyable read, and I think it was quite well-written, especially in hindsight. While not a mystery novel, the mystery that Q is faced with is rather delicious, and while I would have liked a little more from the side characters, they all felt like believable characters. I think I still have a conflicting relationship with John Green novels, but in my eyes, this book is much better than Looking for Alaska, and probably on par with The Fault in Our Stars, if you can get past how strangely delightful it is to cry your eyes out while reading that book. Paper Towns won't make you bawl, but it will occupy your afternoons in a really nice way.