Looking For Alaska--Part 1

I am so happy to be reading “Looking for Alaska” again!  I read it once in high school, but that was a long time ago.  As I read it is all coming back to me, and it was so hard to stop at the first half but I had other homework to attend to.  Anyway, I really think this book is great for a number of reasons.  I love the vagueness that lies within the characters.  None of them really know each other that well, but for some reason or another they are all great friends.  I think this book, in terms of literature, is pretty average.  It mostly follows normal plot development thus far, though I am not sure what happens in the second half.  I think it is interesting that John Green doesn’t give much background information on the characters.  He allows them to develop as themselves with no historical influence on the reader.  I think this job does a decent job of including the different types of young adults.  It deals with the smart kids, the racial minorities, the rich/jock kids, the stoners at least on a basic level.  One thing I am surprised by is that there is no homosexual character.  I don’t know exactly how I would have put that character in this story but I think it would have been one more idea that the author could have tied in somehow.  I think this is another story that positions adolescents in reality.  These kids are doing things that I think a lot of young adults do; drinking, smoking, having sex, playing pranks.  I do think though that the level at which they do these things is a bit dramatic.  I don’t think, in today’s society at least, that so many high school students are smoking that the campus has to patrol for them.  I also don’t think they are drinking wine in excess like the characters have to this point in the story.  I just think that the author might have tried to make them a little to rebellious.  I can clearly see why parents would challenge this book.  It almost argues that all high school students are drinking and having sex and smoking while I think that there are far fewer students taking part in this than the author makes it seem in this story.  Also, there is some very graphic language.  There are a great number of instances where profanity is used in the first half of this book and I can see why parents would not want their children reading this book.  I do think though that the dialogue in this story is very real.  I think that young adults do talk much like the characters in this book regardless of how their parents want them to talk.  I’m not sure how I would incorporate this book into the classroom yet because I am not sure of the conclusion, but I think it would be interesting to try.  I give this book an A.  I give it this grade for a number of reasons, but the number one reason is that because it kept me up at night when I should have been sleeping simply because I needed to know what was going to happen next.