I’ll admit when I saw this on the class list my immediate reaction was not excitement (Those of you from my class now know my dirty secret: the incomplete). It was okay. I had nothing against the book but nothing about it really caught me looking at the cover and reading blurbs. I suppose part of it is that it is not even the story that really got me. It was Green’s writing. Someone else might have told the exact same story and I would have been hardly as intrigued. I was a lot like Q when I was in high school so well behaved and boring. The interactions with Ben and Radar had me chuckling on a regular basis. Though exaggerations I could see them in people I know. Recently I read something talking about how we put such a focus on protagonist age in YA, but how the portrayal doesn’t really change. The characters are written by adults and without a label it’s hard to tell the difference between a thirteen year old and a seventeen year old. These characters are all 18 but I can relate at 24 and I’m sure younger ones could as well. I could never decide if I liked Margo or not, but I think I’m supposed to feel that way. There are too many Margos to really know how you feel. I loved the contrasting covers from the beginning, but even more having read the book to appreciate how differently you can see Margo. (Yes, I am going to start trying to have covers on the blog. My copy is the blue by the way! We’ll see how it lasts. If I like it I might even do some back adding.)
