Looking For Alaska - by John Green

Title: Looking For Alaska
Author: John Green
Published: 28 Feb 2013
Series: -
Rating: 5 stars
Synopsis:
"Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words–and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet Francois Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps.” Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young. Clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy, Alaska will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps."




I had had this book for a while on my "To Read" bookshelf before I finally got around to reading it. The reason I read it was that I was comparing two texts in English for school and I chose this to be one of those two. As I read, this book had me glued to my seat off in a world of my own until I had reached the very last page. There was one moment where Looking for Alaska had me crying so much I couldn't keep reading as I couldn't even see the page!

Out of all the 263 pages in this novel, Alaska was by far my favourite character as you never quite knew what she was going to do next - always keeping you guessing. All of the characters in this book felt as if you could pass them on the street one day and stop and say hi to them.

However, the one thing that I didn't particularly like in Looking for Alaska was that at the beginning I had utterly no clue what was being counted down towards. When I finally did find out what it was for (on page 165 out of the total 263) then I was too busy crying to feel relieved that I had finally found out and that my curiousity was sated.

In the end, it was a fabulous book and I would recommend it to people aged 16 and upwards. If you liked this book then you will probably like John Green's The Fault in Our Stars too.

Spoiler Alert!

I know that this is going to sound completely horrible, but my favourite part of this book was where Alaska died. This is only because this, to me, is where all the action happened - the car crash, the pain inside Miles, the note from Takumi, etc.  This was the part that had me crying for somewhere between half an hour to an hour.


End Spoilers!