For the month of September, All the Blog’s a Page (AtBaP) is looking at authors who have been put into the genre “young adult fiction.” Our final author of the month is a just-added author to my LOVE TO READ column for his realistic portrayals of teens and life in his works. It doesn’t hurt that I just learned a new word from him: Weltschmerz. Have to read full feature to get the word’s meaning! We conclude our month of YA fiction authors with John Green!

About Paper Towns:

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life–dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge–he follows.

After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues–and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he knew.

When asked Why write teen fiction, Green replied, “Well, I like teenagers both as characters and as an audience. I like them because they’re in the process of forming their values, and because they’re willing to grapple unironically with the big questions of our species: Why is the suffering in our world distributed so arbitrarily and unfairly? What are our responsibilities to ourselves, to those we love, to those we don’t love? What does it even mean to be human? That’s the kind of stuff I like to think about, and so it’s the kind of stuff I like to write about, and I find that teenagers are just a great audience.

Like, this does not directly relate to my books, but once a week or so, I do a live show online. People (mostly teens) watch online while I answer their questions and read from old poems and stuff. It’s amazingly fulfilling to read Whitman and Dickinson and Keats with these kids; I feel like my writing is just another path to that same experience, the chance to have a conversation with people who are really engaged and curious and conscious of the connection between their values and their lives.”

Come by AtBaP to continue reading John Green’s thoughts on YA fiction and to read the first pages of Paper Towns!

ALL THE BLOG’S A PAGE (AtBaP) – Where everything relates to writing
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