Ocean City Free Public Library Book Blog

      Paper Towns by John Green was first published in October of 2008, and was his third novel. With the announcement that Paper Towns was going to be adapted for the screen, following the success of the film adaptation of Green's latest novel, The Fault in Our Stars, I decided it was a perfect time to reread the book.       Paper Towns follows the story of a highschooler named Quentin "Q" Jacobson and his friendship with an eccentric girl named Margo Roth Spiegelman. The bulk of the novel is Q following clues left behind by Margo after she runs away from home several weeks before they were to graduate. Along the way Q finds himself forced to reevaluate his perspective about his town, his friends, his classmates, and his idealised image of Margo. ***       Rereading this YA novel, I immediately remembered what it was about Paper Towns that set it apart from other YA novels. There are a lot of stories in the Y...

Despite the incendiary title, this novel was more like a modern day version of Lolita than anything else. Thirteen year old Jasira moves in with her extremely strict Lebanese father after her mother feels threatened by her daughter's sensual effect on older men. Things go from bad to worse for Jasira as she struggles to accept her father's isolating attitude, racist remarks from classmates because of her mixed heritage and her black boyfriend, an inappropriate relationship with her next door neighbor and just plain old adolescent angst. I felt so horrible for poor Jasira throughout this entire book - I mean, the kid has no awareness about her growing sexuality, her awful father is emotionally vacant and physically abusive, she confuses rape with a warped perception of love and on top of all that, she gets picked on because of her ethnicity. Though the book *does* have a happy ending, it comes at a really depressing cost. The only shining light in this kind of bleak novel is Ja...

Fans of the first Mortified book will undoubtedly be amused at Nadelberg's second collection of angsty adolescent essays, centered on the idea of teenage love. The anthology features bad poetry, abysmal song lyrics, journal entries and cartoons all from the submitters' teenage archives. What makes the Mortified series so funny is the awful truthfulness in every submission - who hasn't lusted after the unattainable popular person in high school or obsessed over one of their high school teachers? Adolescence is a time of confusion, self reflection and hormonal narcissism...it's nice to see that we are not alone in our painfully awkward experiences.