Module 5: Looking for Alaska

Book Summary:

This story is about a lonely boy looking for friends, his prankster of a roommate and his depressed with life girlfriend. Miles begs his parents to send him to prep school their he meets and befriends his roommate and a girl named Alaska. Throughout the story Miles experiences what most teenagers experience, sex, cigarettes, and alcohol, but he also experiences what not a lot of teens experience and that is grief, and loss. 

Book Citation:

Green, J. (2007). Looking for alaska. (1 ed.). New York: Penguin Group.

Impressions:

This coming of age story is beautifully written. The characters are believable and real. Green is able to add in the teen experiences of drugs, alcohol and sex without sounding stereotypical. I felt like I was part of Mile's group. I thought they were all friends and happy as a clam and then Green throws you a punch. I cried so much when I read this book. It was great.  When I read books of this nature, I am reminded that people only show you what they want you to see.  Just because someone says they are happy doesn't mean that they really are. It is important to know the warning signs of depression, and to know what a cry for help looks like.

Reviews:

From School Library Journal

Grade 9 Up - Sixteen-year-old Miles Halter's adolescence has been one long nonevent - no challenge, no girls, no mischief, and no real friends. Seeking what Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps," he leaves Florida for a boarding school in Birmingham, AL. His roommate, Chip, is a dirt-poor genius scholarship student with a Napoleon complex who lives to one-up the school's rich preppies. Chip's best friend is Alaska Young, with whom Miles and every other male in her orbit falls instantly in love. She is literate, articulate, and beautiful, and she exhibits a reckless combination of adventurous and self-destructive behavior. She and Chip teach Miles to drink, smoke, and plot elaborate pranks. Alaska's story unfolds in all-night bull sessions, and the depth of her unhappiness becomes obvious. Green's dialogue is crisp, especially between Miles and Chip. His descriptions and Miles's inner monologues can be philosophically dense, but are well within the comprehension of sensitive teen readers. The chapters of the novel are headed by a number of days "before" and "after" what readers surmise is Alaska's suicide. These placeholders sustain the mood of possibility and foreboding, and the story moves methodically to its ambiguous climax. The language and sexual situations are aptly and realistically drawn, but sophisticated in nature. Miles's narration is alive with sweet, self-deprecating humor, and his obvious struggle to tell the story truthfully adds to his believability. Like Phineas in John Knowles's A Separate Peace(S & S, 1960), Green draws Alaska so lovingly, in self-loathing darkness as well as energetic light, that readers mourn her loss along with her friends. - Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Library Uses:

This book can be used as a feature during banned books week.  This book can also be used in a unit about suiside, or being a teenager in general.  This book can also be used to showcase book awards, Printz award or honor in this case.