Review: Looking for Alaska

“I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.”

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐/5

*SPOILERS AHEAD – Read at your own peril*

So, this is John Green’s first novel, about a boy, Pudge, who transfers to a boarding school. The story is divided into the Before – where Pudge grows close with his new friends, Chip, Takumi and Alaska – and the After – following Alaska’s sudden death in a car crash. Green says he wanted to write ‘meaningful‘ young adult fiction and I would argue, he succeeds so completely.

I bought this three years ago because a friend recommended it to me and, like most things, stuck it under a pile of other books and left it to collect dust. It was only post-exam season that I picked it up again and fell back into reading.

It was perfect because I needed to settle my head back down after spending hours at a time poring over revision – it’s such easy reading. It flows well and I just laid back and read and read.

John Green has a particular writing style that reads like someone, who doesn’t have enough years under their belt, telling you a story that shouldn’t be especially exciting but the way they’re waving their arms about and smoking that cigarette has you rapt. He’s funny and quick and dry. He comes up with the oddest attributes for his characters. I read The Fault Under Our Stars, back when everyone else was reading it, too, and I still remember the ‘power of the metaphor’.

Here, it’s the power of last words.

“Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were ‘I go to seek a Great Perhaps.’ That’s why I’m going. So I don’t have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.”

It should take away from the story, it should make the reader pull right out and say, Huh? But it doesn’t. That’s the beauty of John Green’s stories – he throws in something slightly odd and, instead of it feeling forced or confusing, it is, for some reason, becoming on his characters and they wear it like something you wished you had.

Last words is something I’d never thought to be interested in but Green, through Pudge, gives them a certain weight. There’s a fascination in the last thing, ever, that a person had to say.

There’s also a humour. My favourite has got to be Henrik Ibsen, a Norwegian playwright:

“He’d been sick for awhile and his nurse said to him, ‘You seem to be feeling better this morning,’ and Ibsen looked at her and said, ‘On the contrary,’ and then he died.”

You can find all of the last words in Looking for Alaska, on this helpful little page.

What really struck me though, about half way through, is the sudden portrayal of grief. I’ve never read anything that so perfectly crystallised mourning. When Alaska died, I sobbed and sobbed over the pages. But it was everyone else’s reactions that so completely shook me. It’s true what they tell writers – it’s the other character’s reactions to death that will break a reader’s heart.

There is something cruel about killing a character not yet in love but on the cusp of it. The protagonist, Pudge, describes, in one of my favourite scenes of the book, “We didn’t have sex. We never got naked. I never touched her bare breast, and her hands never got lower than my hips. It didn’t matter. As she slept, I whispered, ‘I love you, Alaska Young.’”

It’s wholly beautiful to read about an almost Romeo and Juliet parallel that isn’t forged in a week between two horny teenagers who wax poetry about the sun, the moon and the stars. These are two broken people who smoke under a bridge and lie in bed next to each other, just brushing the backs of their hands against the idea of love to see what it feels like.

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase.”

That’s why I laughed out loud when I read that Looking for Alaska was named the most complained about book in 2015, in the USA. It was banned from many schools, formally challenged at libraries and topped The Bible as most complained about.

Why?

Because the characters smoke and drink and shag and swear – and people don’t like to remember their youth, I suppose.

Alongside Fun Home, Two Boys Kissing and Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, the book has been formally reviewed by libraries and schools on the premise of banning it from syllabus and display. There’s a very clear link here, I would argue, and that is teenagers. All the books feature the not-so-pure lives of teens. It’s easy enough to guess that most of the backlash comes from people much older than teenagers who want to protect the youth of America from ‘the demons of hedonism’.

But how dare schools consider taking this book off the syllabus? It discusses grief among teens that teachers cannot teach, the difference between sex and intimacy that will never be in a Sex and Relationships class, it lays out the dangers of drinking and drugs in a way that no amount of scolding from elders could do.

Looking for Alaska is a beautiful coming-of-age guide that nurtures the part of a teenager’s mind that says but why?

“I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.”

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐/5