Plot Summary, Analysis And Review Of The Book Paper Towns By John Green
When Quintin (Quin) and Margo were nine-years-old, they found a dead body in the park. While Quin cowered behind, Margo almost touches the dead man but Quin had enough and they went home. The next day they found out it was a suicide. Both puzzled about why he killed himself, Margo conducts a whole investigation on that puzzling question and reports her finding to Quin that night, from outside his bedroom window. She concludes that the man was sad because he was getting a divorce, Quin stood there with more xquestions “lots of people get divorced and they don't kill themselves, so why did he?” Margo answered, “I think I know why maybe all the strings inside him broke. ”
They really haven't hung out since that night, nine long years ago but now Margo is back at his window and she’s back for a favor. Determined to do eleven deeds and to fulfill this unusual to-do-list but she needs a car and a getaway man and that's where Quin comes in. At first, he refuses but then agrees to after she explains it has something to do with him, specifically a justice for him too. They go after those that did them wrong, humiliating Margo’s cheating boyfriend and using hair removal cream to remove the eyebrows of Quin's school bully After their heroic deeds, they sit at the top of a skyscraper (they passed security because Margo knows one of the guards) looking out to the amazing and almost artificial view of Orlando. Margo comments that “it's a paper town, not hard enough to be plastic, with houses that were meant to fall apart and with people who don't care about anything that matters, just their paper lives and paper-thin stuff”, pointing out the faults and fakeness of this breathtaking sight.
Margo doesn't come to school the next day or the next day and on the third day, she is officially missing, Quin tells the police everything he knows but it's not enough to find her, until him and his friends find a weird poster in her room that could only be a clue, possibly of where she is. After the authorities have failed to find her, Quin, Ben, Lacey, and Radar (his friends) decide to investigate for themselves. They find more significant clues that eventually lead up to a poetry book that's been edited in the margins and highlighted by Margo, a note falls out, with the address of an abandoned mall. Almost positive that she's committed suicide and almost positive that when they got there they would find Margo. Either dead or alive. To their surprise, she's not there, all that's left is a nail polish bottle, a blanket, and a travel guide. They’ve hit a dead-end, dead on. Disappointed they return back home, still at the same place where they started and still with no Margo. Three days later they go back to the abandoned mall again, hoping to find another clue but end up meeting a group of “urban explorers”; one of them is Gus, the guard that Margo knows. He explains that she mostly wrote in a book then did any exploring, they later find pin-marks in the wall of the abandoned mall and try to understand where the location is. It's not until after a party that Quin gets so frustrated, that he rips the map from the wall in Margo's room, realizing that the map uses to be over the wall in the mall and under the pins, revealing the location, possibly of where she is. Quin and his three friends visit the abandoned mall again, hopefully for the last time, they place the map over the pins. Most of the map is torn, but there's one place that's not, that has a pin in it, it's somewhere in the state of New York but not the city. Even though they know the general area of where she might be, they still don't know exactly where but Quin might, a clue that Margo said, her last night before she disappeared, the night she was with Quin, “Paper Town. ” A town that doesn't exist but a name that Quin thinks might symbolize something, somewhere, maybe where she is. He tries to find an alternate meaning or definition for “Paper Town”: copyright traps that are used by mapmakers to find and identify map plagiarism, which leads him to a Paper Town, Agloe, New York. Quin finds a comment on Agloe’s Omnictionary page (Radar's project that is similar to “Wikipedia”) that looks like Margo's style of writing (ignoring the rules of capital letters) and that most likely was written by her. Informing anyone on the page that “the population of agloe will be one until May 29, at noon. ” He finally found where she is, but it’s May 28th and Quin only has 21 hours and 45 minutes until she disappears again, making the population zero. Quin and his friends go to find her, missing the day of graduation in the process to finally find Margo. There's no time to sleep and not enough food or money so they have to sleep in shifts, always with someone driving behind the wheel and going over the speed limit, just to make it in time. Sometime later, his friends question his decision to go after something or possibly someone because of seemingly random clues that could mean anything, Quin gets mad and almost hits the cow on the road but Ben steers the wheel in the other direction, turning the car into a ditch. Surprisingly, no one is hurt but there is some car damage that will cost a lot but nevertheless, they continue. As the hours pass by Quin stars to enjoy the ride and finding Margo becomes less and less important, he sleeps for the rest of the trip.
When they reach Agloe, New York they see Margo’s car parked in the front of a store. She's inside, writing something down in her notebook, looking tired and dirty. From her response of “What, the hell are you doing here?”, it becomes clear that she didn't want them or anyone else to find her and that she left the clues for fun so that Quin could find her but she has no intentions of coming back home. She only wants to stay in New York and find herself, someone other than just a paper girl in a Paper Town. She drives them to the nearest hotel and leaves, going into her separate way, not to come back with Quin and not to come back to her “home”, the home she called a Paper Town.
The story is mainly focused on Quentin and his journey, mentally of finding Margo and slowly, over time revealing his feelings for her, how much he actually cares for someone who he's only really interacted with a few times and how much braver and carefree he got through the course of the story. In the begging, when he and Margo are kids, he's afraid and scared of the dead man, a general easily frightened kid, “I took two small steps backward, I remember thinking to myself, that if I made any sudden movements, he might wake up and attack me” and later on before Margo came to his window (for the second) time he wasn’t adventurous had a lack of confidence and was anxious, “I really don’t want to get in any trouble, I tell Margo” which at first, caused him to refuse her offer of being a getaway driver, but with persuasion he said yes. Over time though, he gets braver and more adventurous, when he snuck out with Margo, he was less scared of getting caught and just enjoyed the moment of adventure. After she goes missing, he drove away for 21 hours with 3 other friends, a daring thing he would have never done in the begging of the book or even before Margo was at his window for the second time. I think the primary reason for this character change is primarily because of Margo and her free-spirit like personality and her willingness to do anything risky or dangerous, has rubbed off on Quin while she was with him and even while she was gone, by leaving the clues that would cause him to go to explore abandoned places and even travel hundreds of miles away. He has also developed feeling over the course of the book, since that night when they snuck out, (I smiled, she smiled, I believed the smile” they even bonded while they were sitting on top of the skyscraper and after Margo went missing, his feelings only got stronger. He cared about her so much “I missed her I messed her I missed her I miss her” and wanted to find her so bad that he became kind of obsessed with her, “obviously Margo had intended for it to mean something else to me, the clue was mine” while everything that was going on in his life, like graduating, just didn’t matter, all that mattered was figuring out her clues, finding her, “I stayed there, sitting there and thinking about her” and bringing her home. Until that car ride to Agloe, when he just enjoyed the ride, at that point finding her was less important. It also seemed like he was getting more and more agitated because he couldn't find her, tearing down a map and almost crashing his car into a cow, because he was so angry and frustrated, I think this is caused by his stress of failing to find Margo at the beginning of the book. From the begging her was a coward and scared, when he hung out with Margo, he was brave and daring but when she went missing, he was mad and agitated and started to develop feelings for her, the girl who disappeared. By the end of the book, he hit his high of frustration during the road trip, started to calm down and realized that he took it too far but he also realized that she brought out the adventure and spirit in him, changing the way he is, for the better. There’s really no other character development and change because the story mainly focused on the view of Quin, his thoughts, what he did throughout the book and how he tried to solve his problems and the mysteries.
One of the primary themes of Paper Town is Obsession and how obsessed Quin was with Margo, throughout the story, only focusing on finding her instead of anything else going on in his life, to the point that she was everything to him and controlled his moods. If he found a clue, he would be ecstatically happy, if he hit a dead end, then he would rage out, destroying things. Another primary theme of Paper Town is friendship, even when Quin was so obsessed with Margo, his friends stuck by him and helped him through it. They were such good friends that when he had this crazy idea of going to someplace, found by random connects with clues, they still went with him. At the end of the book, they were still there for him, when Margo was not. The third primary theme is change and reality, specifically how people change and people who failed to realize what was actually real. Margo as a kid was supposedly a great friend to Quin but over the years she’s changed.
Through middle and most of high school, Quin didn't know her and those are vital times when people change, she's not this amazing, perfect person she was before, 9 years ago but Quin still thought she still was the same wonderful person she was, as a kid. Which brings us to the topic of reality, through most of this book. Quin has this image of an amazing and great person that he was really good friends with, “there she was, the girl who was an idea I loved” when in reality, he only knew her when they were little and hung out with her for a night. He had become so fixated to the idea that they had a bond, still clinging to the memories of them as a kid. “At this idea of me, you keep inside your brain from when we were little”. He also really believed that they had a strong bond from her last night when they were together. That when he found her they would end up going home and being together, happily ever after but that just wasn't reality. Quin had failed to realize that he was so obsessed with a person he barely knew, he failed to realize how twisted she was for sending him on a hunt, just not to come home and how much of an un-idealistic person she really was. “Not being the Margo I thought I had finally imagined correctly”. All because he was stuck in a fantasy world where she was perfect, where she didn't want to leave, where she wanted to come back home with him, where she wanted to be found, “I thought you wanted me to find you?” “I sure did not” and where they would fall in love with each other. “Not being the Margo I expected her to be”. That fantasy wasn't real, it didn't happen and in the story, it never would. Focusing away from the more negative side of the theme, Quin has grown a lot as a person, finally learning the things and people that actually matter in his life, like college and his good friends.
I would definitely recommend this book to others because it’s an amazing story of a teen that grows and fights so much to find a girl, even though it’s kind of stupid, the story is also kind of sweet. While reading this book, you’ll find a true meaning to the word paper town and how it connects to the story and how it means something and I think it’s interesting to follow the journey and the thought process of Quin, who learns more and realizes important truths, as the story goes. I really feel like I relate to Quin, being afraid and anxious about a lot of things in life and I relate to the fact that he only really saw the best parts or only wanted to see the best parts in Margo, which I do to people all the time. I think they’re a good person at first and that they’re amazing but as I look deeper, they’re really not all that, they’re just people. I get frustrated when I can't figure something out, especially when the answer seems so simple. I also somewhat relate to Margo, in the sense that I sometimes feel like I need to find what I'm supposed to do and who I'm supposed to be, just like her and that’s why she ran away. This book has inspired me to think deeper into the meaning of things and to really think about what I want to do, who I'm supposed to be in life, with all Margo’s talk in the story about going to the paper town to figure out who she is. This book relates to my life, in the way that sometimes I just want to run away from my problems, start fresh or really figure something out, which is what happens in the plot of the book. I think a strength of this book is its ability to get you thinking about true meanings and the reality of change and how people actually are, just normal people. A weakness of this book would be the lack of perspective because we only get one side of the story (from Quins point-of-view) if they had more sides to the story, maybe we could better understand the book and what happens. This entire story is a great example of yet, another amazing work by John Green. This is really a thought-provoking book that will open your heart, eyes, and mind, to the truth of the world, how people change, what reality is and how people really are.
