An Abundance of Katherines ~John Green~

                An Abundance of Katherines. The title itself is enough to spark curiosity in any reader, at least it did in me. The reason I picked up this book was not because of the title, or cover, or recommendation, rather because of the author. 

                John Green is a writer that I admire very much for his down to earth writing style, sarcastic humor, and beautiful quotes. I loved his books The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns and I had heard that An Abundance of Katherines was similar. My, it was similar. Almost too similar. 

                Yes, the plot was different. Yes, the location was different. And the character personalities were a bit different too. Yet, the basic theme of the book was the same as every other John Green novel I’ve come across so far. All his books are so similar that, often times, when I think of them, they all sort of blend into one long laborious novel of drunken teens searching for happiness, fearing oblivion, and desiring to date someone who is unattainable. 

                In Paper Towns, Looking for Alaska, Will Grayson Will Grayson, and An Abundance of Katherines, a boy, who is not the coolest kid around, loves some girl/guy who is way out of his league. He usually gets a small preview of life as the “special someone” ‘s love interest before the trials and injustices of the world tear them apart. 

                In the case of An Abundance of Katherines, Colin, a child prodigy, who is bound to his ritual of falling in love with girls named Katherine, falls in love with a girl named Lindsey. Lindsey, however, is dating another guy, who’s actually cheating on her, and yeah. It’s basically a big romantic mess. Yuck.

                Colin and Lindsey, both, are facing the same struggles and doubts that most of the teens in John Green’s other novels face: fear of oblivion, insignificance, false pretenses, and the general feeling of unworthiness. I admit, more than once in An Abundance of Katherines, I felt comforted knowing that there are people who feel like they’re hiding behind a mask made of expectations, like I often feel. John Green does a great job in expressing some of the worries and concerns of a teenager, but I wish he wouldn’t choose the same worries and concerns in each of his novels. 

                An Abundance of Katherines was cleaner than many of his novels, which isn’t actually saying much. In his books, he tends to describe much of the intimate romance that I would rather not envision. However, An Abundance of Katherines was fairly clean, minus an illicit coitus and a few hundred crude jokes and cuss words. 

The book was an enjoyable read, and I felt connected to the characters, albeit their uncanny resemblance to other John Green novel characters. John Green writes so beautifully, and I definitely appreciate his skill in transforming the simple thoughts of a teenager into beautiful words.  Yes, the book was similar to Green’s others, but it was different enough that I could still read it and enjoy the suspense of the plot. 

~

 

“You can love someone so much but you can never love someone as much as you can miss them.” 

“The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that you get to a point where nothing is real.”

“Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside of you? I always wonder about that. If people could see me the way I see myself. If they could live in my memories would anyone love me?”

“He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.”

“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they will always love you back.”

“I don’t think you can ever fill the empty spaces with the thing you lost…I don’t think your missing pieces ever fit inside you again once they go missing.”

“They like their coffee like they like their ex-boyfriends: bitter.” 

“I will get forgotten, but the stories will last.”

“One of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.” 

“The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.” 

“The missing piece in his stomach hurt so much-and eventually he stopped thinking about the Theorem and wondered only how something that isn't there can hurt you.”

 “I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you.”

“He missed his imagined future.”

“Half-drunk on well-creamed gas station coffee and the exhilarating loneliness of a freeway in nighttime...”