Colin Singleton has just graduated from high school, but he worries he’s already past his peak: he was a child prodigy, but doesn’t really know what he’s good at, aside from learning languages and remembering facts and anagramming phrases, and he fears he won’t actually amount to anything. And to make things worse he just got dumped a girl named Katherine. Which might not sound like the end of the world, but it’s the nineteenth time he’s been dumped by a girl named Katherine, because girls named Katherine are the only ones he ever dates, and he always gets dumped. So Colin’s at a bit of a crisis point. But the answer, sometimes, is just a change of scenery: so instead of learning Sanskrit over the summer (as his dad suggests), he lets his best/only friend, Hassan, talk him into a road trip. Except they only get from Chicago to Tennessee. There, in a middle-of-nowhere town called Gutshot, they meet a girl who’s about their age and her mom, who likes them right away and promptly offers them summer jobs working on an oral history project she’s just starting to put together. Humor and romance and Eureka moments ensue, plus footnotes, plus math: Colin comes up with and tries to perfect a “Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability,” a function that will let him graph his nineteen relationships with Katherines but will also predict, in any relationship, who’s going to dump whom and when.
I like how John Green writes—this book is funny, and Colin’s utter different-ness is often used to humorous effect, like:
“I’m behind on my reading,” Colin explained.
“Behind on your reading? All you do is read,” Lindsey said.
“I’ve been way behind because I’ve worked so hard on the Theorem and because of oral historianing. I try to read four hundred pages a day—ever since I was seven.” (p 109)
But there are lyrical bits, too, especially at the end, as Colin learns that connections between people, not just ideas, matter, and realizes that storytelling is sometimes a more useful skill than math.
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