looking for alaska

Green, John. looking for alaska. New York: Dutton Books, 2005.

Annotation: Lonely and bored, Miles leaves his Florida home for boarding school, looking for "the Great Perhaps." There, he finds real friends, real love, real fun, and real grief.

Justification for nomination: Alaska's a beautiful, tortured soul - a sixteen-year-old girl that Miles Halter, this story's protagonist, can neither get enough of nor understand. When Alaska's reckless behavior and frequent drinking eventually kills her, the friends she leaves behind aren't sure if her death was an accident. They also bear some responsibility, as none of them stopped her from driving off to her tragic end in a drunken stupor .

This story's been done before. Boarding school setting, friction between the insulated rich and the scrabbling poor, a talented kid dying some sort of thoughtless death..I'm thinking "Dead Poet's Society" or "A Separate Peace", for starters. Nonetheless, I loved this book. John Green's interweaving of Miles' adolescent desires, both known and unknown, with the lectures and questions of an aging "World Religions" teacher is deft and nearly perfect. Religion is how humans have always dealt with the underlying mysteries of life (gender, sex, death, love, to name some of the big ones) and I'm completely grateful to the author for writing this beautiful and honest meditation on the subject.

Genre: Printz/coming-of-age/edgy.