Looking for Alaska by John GreenSpeak (Penguin), 2007 (originally Dutton Books, 2005)

Miles Halter leaves Florida at the start of his junior year: he’s headed for the Alabama boarding school that his father also attended, but it’s not really out of tradition that he’s going, and it’s not that he’s had a particularly traumatic high school experience thus far. I mean, he’s a nerd, and doesn’t really have any friends, but he’s been basically OK with that. Except not really. Miles loves reading biographies, and is especially fond of learning people’s last words, and one set of last words attributed to Rabelais, “I go to seek a Great Perhaps,” resonates with him. Miles senses that there’s a “Great Perhaps” out there and hopes that attending Culver Creek might help him start to find it.

So: he shows up at boarding school, ends up with an unpopular but smart and friendly roommate, and finds himself in a circle of friends that includes said roommate (Chip, aka the Colonel), a guy named Takumi, a girl named Lara, and centrally, a girl named Alaska, the Alaska of the title, who’s smart and hot and funny and who, clearly, quickly becomes the object of Miles’s fantasies and affection, even though she’s dating a college kid. So we have these kids, and we have their normal lives at school, but it’s clear from the back cover copy and from the way the story itself is structured—divided into a “before” and an “after”—that some big event is going to upset the ordinariness of high school life. Which it does, leaving Miles and his friends struggling to figure out the how and the why of what exactly happened.

This was kind of a guilty pleasure book for me: it’s not badly written but it’s not super-literary either, and there are plot points that are overly obvious/that make you wonder why Miles, who at one point notes that his “general social strategy” consists of “listening quietly,” didn’t pick up on them sooner. And it’s easy to find fault with the characters, how it feels like you don’t really get to know some of them (what does Takumi like, other than hip-hop? what is Lara like, other than pretty and quiet and Romanian?)—although partly that’s to do with the first-person narration, too: Miles really doesn’t get to know Lara very well, even though he briefly dates her, so neither do we. But mostly I was too busy reading this book quickly over the course of two days to quibble with it much, and I’m still looking forward to reading more John Green.