Friday, December 8, 2006

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

I suppose I should really let this one percolate a bit in my mind before writing about it, but I'm not doing so. I just finished the book a few minutes ago and I enjoyed it. It is a quirky book - and you really have to enjoy supreme nerdiness, but it's got humor and a good heart, too.

The plot: Colin Singleton, a super smart "child prodigy" has dated 19 Katherines, all of whom have dumped him. To recover from his most recent dumping, he and his friend, Hassan, go on a road trip. They end up in a tiny dead-end town called Gutshot, Tennessee, where they get hired to do a town history. They live with the town matriarch, the town's only factory owner, and her daughter. The daughter, Lindsey, has a boyfriend. Colin spends a lot of his time trying to come up with a mathematical equation for a romantic relationship. Colin is truly a nerd, but eventually, even he learns to relax and live with an unpredictable future.

I guess I am just nerdy enough to find the footnoted tidbits laugh-out-loud funny. This kid remembers the first 99 digits of pi by making up a sentence with the first letter of each work coded to the numbers of pi. And he anagrams everything. It is close enough to what I have done for me to feel the gently mocking humor, yet far enough off the deep end that I don't feel threatened by it.

The very end of the book seems to get a bit preachy and didactic, but the idea is good and I guess the preachiness is in character.

A word of caution: yes, there is teen sex in the book. I usually don't like that much - and I don't like it in this case either, but I think it was probably called for, plotwise. That isn't always the case, but, in this book I think it was necessary in order for the characters to make some radical and anticipated changes in their lives.

Worth reading.

No comments:

Post a Comment