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Paper Towns
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Read Paper Towns

Paper Towns (2008) (edit title/settings)

by John Green (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life--dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge--he follows. After their all-nighter ends... read more

Summary edit see section history

From School Library Journal
Starred Review. Grade 9 Up—Quentin Jacobsen, 17, has been in love with his next-door neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman, for his entire life. A leader at their Central Florida high school, she has carefully cultivated her badass image. Quentin is one of the smart... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

From School Library Journal
Starred Review. Grade 9 Up—Quentin Jacobsen, 17, has been in love with his next-door neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman, for his entire life. A leader at their Central Florida high school, she has carefully cultivated her badass image. Quentin is one of the smart kids. His parents are therapists and he is, above all things, "goddamned well adjusted." He takes a rare risk when Margo appears at his window in the middle of the night. They drive around righting wrongs via her brilliant, elaborate pranks. Then she runs away (again). He slowly uncovers the depth of her unhappiness and the vast differences between the real and imagined Margo. Florida's heat and homogeneity as depicted here are vivid and awful. Green's prose is astounding—from hilarious, hyperintellectual trash talk and shtick, to complex philosophizing, to devastating observation and truths. He nails it—exactly how a thing feels, looks, affects—page after page. The mystery of Margo—her disappearance and her personhood—is fascinating, cleverly constructed, and profoundly moving. Green builds tension through both the twists of the active plot and the gravitas of the subject. He skirts the stock coming-of-age character arc—Quentin's eventual bravery is not the revelation. Instead, the teen thinks deeper and harder—about the beautiful and terrifying ways we can and cannot know those we love. Less-sophisticated readers may get lost in Quentin's copious transcendental ruminations—give Paper Towns to your sharpest teens.—Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Characters edit see section history

  • Quentin Jacobson: Main character of the novel who begins to question everything about life after a night with Margo.
  • Margo Roth Spiegelman: A music loving, slightly odd girl who seems more magical than she is, who has to have everything precisely planned out. Margo Roth Speigelman is the girl at school that everyone wants to be. Q has had a crush on her since their childhood.
  • Ben Starling: Quentin's best friend.
  • Radar: Quentin's other best friend.
  • Lacey Pemberton: Margo's best friend, whom Margo becomes angry at.
  • Angela: Radar's girlfriend
  • Chuck Parson: A large bully in the school.
  • Ruthie: Margo's little sister, who is approximately eleven.
  • Jason 'Jase' Worthington: Margo's boyfriend and a jock.
  • Myrna Mountweazel: Margo's dog
  • Margo Roth Speigelman: Margo lives next door to Quinten (Q for short) and has since they were 2. Margo has always loved mysteries. And, in the words of John Green, "Maybe she loved mysteries so much she became one."
  • Karin: Q's ex-girlfriend.
  • Dr. Holden: Quentin's English teacher.
  • Dr. Jefferson Jefferson: Subdivision and town named after this man, who changed his first name to Dr., his middle name to Jefferson so he could be referred to as Dr. Jefferson Jefferson.
  • Radar: Radar is Quinten's friend who happens to be the son of the people who own the world's largest collection of Black Santas. He devotes his life to the accuracy of user-made dictionary, Omnictionary, presumably based on Wikipedia.
  • Suzie Chung: Q's ex-girlfriend who plays the cello.
  • Robert Joyner: The man that Margo and Quentin find dead in a local park when they were ten years old.
Show all 17 characters
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Quotes edit see section history

  • “What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.”
  • “Maybe it’s more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like, each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen- these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable… But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it’s only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”
    Margo Roth Speigelman
  • “I hope I get pulled over. I'd like to see how the cop responds to a black man wearing a Confederate T-shirt over a black dress.”
    Radar
  • “I have a lot of anger right now! I was enjoying punching that guy! I want to go back to puching that guy!”
    Ben
  • “IT'S NOT MY FAULT MY PARENTS OWN THE LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS!”
    Radar
  • “Yeah. I'm a big believer in random capitalization. The rules of capitalization are so unfair to the words in the middle of a sentence.”
    Margo Roth Speigelman
  • “We bring the f****** rain, Q. Not the scattered showers.”
    Margo Roth Speigelman
  • “Everybody, hey, shut up, hold on, shut up-- QUENTIN JACOBSEN IS INSIDE MY PHONE!”
    Ben
  • “'NOOOO! Booooo. Booo on Quentin. Hey, everybody! Boooo Quentin!' And then I was booed. 'Everybody's drunk. Ben drunk. Lacey drunk. Radar drunk. Nobody drive. Home by six. Promised mom. Boo, sleepy Quentin! Yay, Designated Driver! YESSSS!'”
    Ben
  • “It's a penis, in the same sense that Rhode Island is a state: it may have an illustrious history, but it sure isn't big.”
    Margo Roth Speigelman
  • “Those of us who frequent the band room have long suspected that Becca maintains her lovely figure by eating nothing but the souls of kittens and the dreams of impoverished children.”
    Quentin
  • “I shaved this morning for precisely that reason. I was like, 'Well, you never know when someone is going to clamp down on your calf and try to suck out the snake poison.'”
    Margo Roth Speigelman
  • “Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will...But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”
  • “Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All the paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.”
    Margo Roth Speigelman
  • “That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.”
    Margo Roth Speigelman
  • “It's true Q. Your grandma loves the brothers.”
    Radar
  • “You will go to the paper towns and you will never come back.”
  • “And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future--you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.”
    Margo Roth Speigelman
  • “Tonight, darling, we are going to right a lot of wrongs. And we are going to wrong some rights. The first shall be last; the last shall be first; the meek shall do some earth-inheriting. But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop.”
    Margo Roth Speigelman
  • “What happens in the band room stays in the band room.”
    Quentin
  • “Bat mitzvah money, bitch.”
    Margo Roth Speigelman
  • “Rader rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I always find myself questioning the way I imagine my myths when I'm eating my lucky charms every morning with a godda**ed black Santa spoon"”
    Rader
  • “Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”
    Q
  • “I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.”
    Margo Roth Speigelman
  • “The town was paper, but the memories were not.”
  • “Eat it, goblin! Eat it like Zeus ate Metis!”
    Ben
  • “Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.”
    Quentin
  • “I wanted to stop peeing but couldn't, of course. Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.”
    Quentin
  • “Take it and use the Power of the Tiny Winky wisely.”
    Margo Roth Spiegelman
  • “...as long as I wasn't ritually decapitating gerbils or urinating on my own face, she figured I was a success.”
    Quentin
  • “Holy shitstickers”
    Ben
  • “RHAPAW ran not on gasoline, but on the inexhaustible fuel of human hope. You would sit on the blistering hot vinyl seat and hope she would start, and then Ben would turn the key and the engine would turn over a couple of times, like a fish on land making its last, meager, dying flop. And then you would hope harder, and the engine would turn over a couple more times. You hoped some more, and it would finally catch.”
    Quentin
  • “Everything's uglier up close”
    Margo
  • “Come here you little bastard. Daddy's gonna put you on a sailboat across the River styxDid you just use Greek Mythology to talk trash?”
    Ben and Q
  • “"I actually think Ben's tongue is like sunscreen. It's good for your health and should be applied liberally" Lacey"I just threw up in my mouth" Radar"Lacey, You just kinda took away my will to go on" Q"I wish I could stop imagining that" Radar"The very Idea is so offensive that it's actually illegal to say the words 'Ben Starling's tongue' on television" Q"The penalty for volating that law s either ten years in prison or one Ben starling Tongue bath" Radar"Everyone" Q"Chooses" Radar"Prison" everyone”
  • “Your ability to not lose your virginity s an inspiration to us all.”
    Ben Starling
Show all 36 quotes from this book

Setting & Locations edit see section history

  • Orlando: Where the book is set. Q lives here.
  • Jefferson Park: A park near where Margo and Quentin's houses.
  • Sea World: A sea-life based theme park in Orlando.
  • Agloe: In New York.

First Sentence edit see section history

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Prologue
PART ONE: The Strings
1. The longest day of my life
2. I swiveled around
3. The thing about Margo Roth Spiegelman
4. We were driving
5. "Part Six,"
6. Tourists never go to downtown Orlando
7. Sitting in the minivan
8. Well, first off
9. We bought dish towels
PART TWO: The Grass
1. I'd been asleep
2. Margo left often enough
3. Every morning
4. We didn't have a view
5. Monday morning
6. After parking in my driveway,
7. Tuesday evening,
8. Mom came into my room
9. We walk around
10. Ben and Radar
11. The next morning at school
12. As I pulled into the minimall parking lot
13. In my dream
14. I slept for a few hours
15. Even though we had a week before finals
16. The clock was always punishing
17. The moment Mom got home
18. I woke up with the sunlight
19. After three long hours alone
20. All night Wednesday
PART THREE: The Vessel
The First Hour
Hour Two
Hour Three
Hour Four
Hour Five-----Hour 21
Agloe

Glossary edit see section history

  • Omnictionary: A fictional site which appears to work somewhat like Wikipedia, but mostly seems to be used by people at Q's school.

Series & Lists edit see section history

This book is in 2011-2012 Iowa High School Book Award. (authoritative list)
This book is in 2013 Iowa High School Battle of the Books. (authoritative list)
This book is in Abraham Lincoln Illinois High School Nominees 2011. (community list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. John Green (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Dutton
Country: USA
Publication Date: 2008
ISBN: 0525478183
Page Count: 305

Awards edit see section history

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

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