“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'”
-Jack Kerouac
I love that quote. I always have. It describes everything I want to be in my life.
Alaska Young is that quote personified. There isn't any way I can describe her that does her any justice except that quote. She defies adjectives.
Looking for Alaska by John Green is like that quote. Miles is quirky in his own subdued, lethargic way, and still normal. He leaves life in Florida where nobody knows him to Culver Creek Boarding School in Alabama (hah, how utterly appropriate), where he rooms with Chip (the Colonel) and befriends Takumi, Lara, and Alaska.
Miles, or Pudge as the Colonel starts calling him ironically, is of course swept off his feet by Alaska. She's in her own league and dimension and mind. She's Edie Sedgwick, just in an Alabama boarding school. She is her own entity. How could she not sweep you off your feet?
The format immediately grabs your attention: there are two parts, Before and After. There is one central part to the book that is both shocking and obvious at the same time. Not hindsight-obvious, but just textbook, no-connotations obvious. And somehow it still shakes your world and starts the roaring in your ears, like every time it's ever happened in real life.
I had this whole post ready revolving around the climax and why it is that things like that always happen, but it really would spoil too much and I can't do that to anybody bothering to read this. So I'll save it for later, when you won't connect it to this book.
In my copy, there's a reading guide in the back. I want to rip it out and tear it to pieces. How can you make some trite reading guide about this book? It's fucking moving. It's honest and real and bewitching and surreal and true. It's like making a reading guide for The Things They Carried so your book club can try to make sense of it. I know, they always do that for books hitting on heavy stuff for teenagers, but that doesn't make it any less cheap and trite. It would be like a reading guide for Speak. Just... unthinkable. Maybe John Green thinks it's okay, but to me it just tries to cheapen the experience I got from this book.
(Yes, I am comparing it to The Things They Carried and Speak. The language is strongly reminiscent of both, but completely different and unique. The themes, though, are closer to the former. Also, both of those books changed my life.)
And you know what? I know he wrote it for high schoolers, but I can't imagine someone my age reading this and not being completely moved by it. Not moved like "oh man, I cried at Where the Red Fern Grows" or something, but... moved. I can't say it any other way. Sometimes there are no words for an experience. Maybe it wouldn't completely change the way my mother sees things or someone her age, but for the large age bracket that is my generation? It more than works.
So in case you didn't get the picture, buy this book. Don't just read it, buy it. It's mind-blowing, which is beautifully rare in young adult novels nowadays. Not a recommendation, an order. Buy it. Read it. And then maybe you'll really understand Jack Kerouac up there and why those people are the only things worth clinging to now.
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