Looking For Alaska - A Book Review

 

Looking For Alaska

By: John Green

 

 

I just read Looking For Alaska about a week ago. I had no idea what the book was going to be about it when I picked it up. I didn't even read the back. My best friend said it was a book that I absolutely had to read and I'll admit it sat on a shelf for a year after she told me about it. I finally decided to read it one night and now I'll be suggesting to you that "you absolutely have to read this book."

 

This book discusses a vast array of topics including friendship, sex, and morality. The first thing I think of while reading this book is the web of feelings I had as a teenager and how everything was dire back then. When you're a teenager everything means more. You feel everything with more passion, you're vehement in your endeavors, and you're fucking stubborn. As a teenager you truly believe that no one knows how you feel. No one could possibly understand you and in turn you feel alone. This is a common theme with all of the characters but especially Alaska.

 

Alaska is the friend that offers advice on all of her friends personal issues yet ironically refuses to disclose her own issues. Throughout the book she seems impulsive always doing things without thinking and to Miles that makes her a beautiful disaster. While reading this book I recognized Alaska's need to do things without thinking about them first because if she stopped to think she might dwell on the past. Dwelling on the past would throw her into a depression. Alaska is the perfect example of someone who hasn't confronted her issues and that to me is the main point of this book.

 

“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape 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.”  

 

One of the main themes of the book is the labyrinth of suffering. Alaska asks Miles how do you get out of the labyrinth. Eventually Alaska decides that to get out of the labyrinth you have to go straight and fast. However, here is my opinion on the matter. In order to get out of the labyrinth you have to face what is keeping you there. For Alaska that is a childhood memory, a deep and sorrowful regret. In order to escape that pain, that feeling of suffering forever you have to face your pain and move forward. In order to resolve your issues you must deal with them and that is something that both Alaska Young and myself have trouble with apparently.

 

You'll have to read the book to find out if she ever makes it out of the labyrinth and I highly suggest you do. John Green does an amazing job with this book. He makes you asks some of life's hardest questions and makes you re-evaluate your opinion of life, love, and death.

 

What is your labyrinth? Do you think you can escape it? Do we ever really escape it or do we learn to live within it peacefully? Is the labyrinth something created by events in our life or do we create it for ourselves? These are the questions you should ask yourself while reading Looking For Alaska.

 

Well what are you waiting for.... Get to reading

 

- Maggie V