Miles Halter is fascinated with famous people's last words and is a bit of an outcast at his high school in Florida, so he asks his parents to send him to Culver Creek boarding school where his dad had gone in Alabama. His roommate is Chip, whose name is perfect for him as he has a chip on his shoulder about the rich people at school (he's there on a scholarship). He goes by the appropriate nickname "The Colonel" as he is great at being a leader who organizes things. He introduces him to Takumi and to the enigmatic and mercurial Alaska with whom Miles, now given the nickname Pudge since he is so scrawny, is falling in love with. Only Alaska has a boyfriend who goes to Vanderbilt. That doesn't stop her from flirting with Pudge though.
Things get serious when the Weekday Warriors, or those who only stay during the week and then go home on the weekends and are very rich and stuck up, don't just toss Pudge in the lake like everyone else goes through as a rite of passage, but duct tape him head to toe and then toss him in. The Colonel becomes livid. The Weekday Warriors think that the Colonel ratted on two people last year that got them expelled. He didn't and now it's on. They've roped in Alaska and Takumi and Lara (a girl that Alaska is trying to set him up with) to get even with them. And while he can have Lara he still loves Alaska.
All the while, Pudge is looking for Alaska. He is trying to figure out this girl who has him tied up in knots who is hot and cold to him; bitchy and then warm and fuzzy. She would go overboard emotionally for no reason that they could see, but then she never told them everything. Like there's a lot I'm not telling you here. This book really got to me. Trying to figure out Alaska is an almost impossible task. I think Green leaves it up to us to come up with our own idea of who she is and what damage she is capable of and what good. This is Green's, who wrote The Fault In Our Stars, won the Prinz Medal for this book and deservedly so. I cannot recommend this book enough.
Quotes
Y’all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.
-John Green (Looking For Alaska p 44)
Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia…You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
-John Green (Looking For Alaska p 54)
“You’re awfully philosophical for a girl that just got busted,” I told her.
“Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.”
-John Green (Looking For Alaska p 56)
She said she still loved me. God, ‘I love you’ really is the gateway drug of breaking up.
-John Green (Looking For Alaska p 78)
So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.
-John Green (Looking For Alaska p 88)
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