Looking For Alaska

Book Cover:   

Book Title: Looking For Alaska

Book Summary: Miles decides that he needs a new adventure in his life because he feels stale and stagnate in his life and at the school he is at.  So he tells his parents that he wants to go to a boarding school to find his “Great Perhaps”.  While there he meets a bunch of new people and his life has become more interesting to say the least.  There is one girl, Alaska, that makes an impression on him and he falls for her but she does not fall for him.  As the book continues you learn more about Alaska and why she is the way she is.     

APA Reference:

Green, J. (2005). Looking for Alaska. New York , New York: Penguin Group

My Impressions:  I love John Green and his ability to make his characters seem and feel real.  This is the second book of his that I have read and I could not put it down for anything in the world.  I have this for my is a book that I can not go and see the movie for, what happens in the story affects you and makes you think about what if.  I have an imaginary friend in the back of my mind taunting my with What if?  How would you react to this situation would you become as implosive as Alaska?  

Professional Review:

School Library Journal February 1, 2005

Gr 9 Up-Sixteen-year-old Miles Halter's adolescence has been one long nonevent-no challenge, no girls, no mischief, and no real friends. Seeking what Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps," he leaves Florida for a boarding school in Birmingham, AL. His roommate, Chip, is a dirt-poor genius scholarship student with a Napoleon complex who lives to one-up the school's rich preppies. Chip's best friend is Alaska Young, with whom Miles and every other male in her orbit falls instantly in love. She is literate, articulate, and beautiful, and she exhibits a reckless combination of adventurous and self-destructive behavior. She and Chip teach Miles to drink, smoke, and plot elaborate pranks. Alaska's story unfolds in all-night bull sessions, and the depth of her unhappiness becomes obvious. Green's dialogue is crisp, especially between Miles and Chip. His descriptions and Miles's inner monologues can be philosophically dense, but are well within the comprehension of sensitive teen readers. The chapters of the novel are headed by a number of days "before" and "after" what readers surmise is Alaska's suicide. These placeholders sustain the mood of possibility and foreboding, and the story moves methodically to its ambiguous climax. The language and sexual situations are aptly and realistically drawn, but sophisticated in nature. Miles's narration is alive with sweet, self-deprecating humor, and his obvious struggle to tell the story truthfully adds to his believability. Like Phineas in John Knowles's A Separate Peace (S & S, 1960), Green draws Alaska so lovingly, in self-loathing darkness as well as energetic light, that readers mourn her loss along with her friends.-Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Citation:

Lewis, J. (2005). Looking for Alaska. School Library Journal, 51(2), 136. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/211790927?accountid=7113

Library Uses: It would be fun to study peoples last words.  Then put together a biography of a historical person and quote what their last words were.  Then taking the time to sit down and figure out what they could have meant.  Like the labyrinth what did that dead guy mean was he stuck in a personal/mental labyrinth or was he stuck in a real labyrinth?  Then I would have the students create a power point of themselves and have explain what their last words were if today was their last day on earth.