Fairly soon after it came out, I read John Green's debut Looking for Alaska, drawn to it in more or less equal parts because John Green and I sat on opposite sides of Jenny Lawton in our college American Lit class and because our school library had a copy that I could read for free. I absolutely loved it and regretted 1) not knowing John better in school and 2) not actually buying a copy of the book and thereby supporting his writing career (that said, the school library did buy the book at my recommendation in the first place). 
 For some reason, I didn't write a review of Looking for Alaska and I didn't pick up any of his subsequent books... until now. This summer I read both An Abundance of Katherines and Will Grayson Will Grayson and very much enjoyed each. Besides having been a teenager once upon a time, I've also made my career around them, and Green writes his adolescent characters with fantastic insight, warmth, and humor. His writing frequently made me laugh, and they were never cheap laughs. His writing sometimes brought tears to my eyes with its poignancy, and there was nothing cheap about that, either. 
 The basic premise is this: two adolescent boys with the name Will Grayson find their lives intersecting in a Chicago porn store. Each has his own problems, his own strengths and limitations, but as we know they will, they come out better off on the other end as a result of this chance encounter. 
 Although this was the first of the two books that I read this summer and although it had been several years since I'd read WFA, I recognized which chapters were Green's right away--they just sound different than the ones written by David Levithan, whose teenaged world just feels darker. To my mind, Green has all the best characters over on his side (they alternated chapters and POV Will Graysons), yet there are things that emerge from stirring it all together that wouldn't have been there otherwise. I don't want to give too much away, but I'll just say that I'm reminded again of the power literature has to give us (and, sometimes, the characters as well) an understanding of themselves and each other that our real, daily lives, seldom offer, and perhaps for that reason they can be very powerfully touching, because they give us an understanding that we wish for and rarely find. 
 Also, I think that the musical that's created within the story should be made, as it would, likewise, be beautiful. And musical.