Written by: John Green
APA citation: Green, J. (2005). Looking for Alaska. New York: Penguin.
Book cover image: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44640217
My summary of the plot: Miles (Pudge) Halter decides to go to a private school. There he meets “The Colonel” and Alaska. The Colonel and Pudge are roommates and become friends. Pudge experiences his first awkward relationship and also falls in love with Alaska.
Spoiler alert: Alaska is in a world of drama and makes a bad decision to drive one night after drinking alcohol. The rest of the novel deals with the results of this night.
Keywords: Boarding schools, death, religion
My Assessment: This is a stunning debut novel. John Green does not shy away from the tough topics, especially death. It contains many beautiful passages such as this one:
“People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn’t bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn’t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn’t even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.”
Audio review: This audio book is exceptionally well done. The narrator perfectly captures the different teenage voices.
Citation for audio book: Green, J. (2008). Looking for Alaska. [Audio Recording] Grand Haven, MI: Brilliance Audio
Professional Review: Gr 9 Up– Sixteen-year-old Miles Halter’s adolescence has been one long nonevent–no challenge, no girls, no mischief, and no real friends. Seeking what Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps,” he leaves Florida for a boarding school in Birmingham, AL. His roommate, Chip, is a dirt-poor genius scholarship student with a Napoleon complex who lives to one-up the school’s rich preppies. Chip’s best friend is Alaska Young, with whom Miles and every other male in her orbit falls instantly in love. She is literate, articulate, and beautiful, and she exhibits a reckless combination of adventurous and self-destructive behavior. She and Chip teach Miles to drink, smoke, and plot elaborate pranks. Alaska’s story unfolds in all-night bull sessions, and the depth of her unhappiness becomes obvious. Green’s dialogue is crisp, especially between Miles and Chip. His descriptions and Miles’s inner monologues can be philosophically dense, but are well within the comprehension of sensitive teen readers. The chapters of the novel are headed by a number of days “before” and “after” what readers surmise is Alaska’s suicide. These placeholders sustain the mood of possibility and foreboding, and the story moves methodically to its ambiguous climax. The language and sexual situations are aptly and realistically drawn, but sophisticated in nature. Miles’s narration is alive with sweet, self-deprecating humor, and his obvious struggle to tell the story truthfully adds to his believability. Like Phineas in John Knowles’s A Separate Peace (S & S, 1960), Green draws Alaska so lovingly, in self-loathing darkness as well as energetic light, that readers mourn her loss along with her friends.
Citation for book review: Lewis, J., Jones, T. E., Toth, L., Charnizon, M., Grabarek, D., & Raben, D. (2005). Looking for Alaska. School Library Journal, 51(2), 136.
Recommendation for library or classroom use: I would recommend this book for a 10th-12th grade English class. I would also recommend it for recreational reading for both males an females.
Audio Review: The narration on the audio book was well done. In particular, the father’s voice was very evocative. The narrator’s voice enabled me to vividly imagine the characters.
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