Module 5 Looking for Alaska

Summary:  Miles has lived an unexciting life.  It fully hits him at his birthday party.  As a result, he decides to go to the boarding school his dad attended in search of “The Great Perhaps.”  Miles hits the roommate jackpot in The Colonel, who, with the help of Alaska, Takumi, and Laura, teach Miles about life.  They pull pranks, they disobey all of the school rules, and they have more fun than Miles has ever had in his life.  Alaska is not well, though, and she goes through massive mood swings.  The book is broken into a countdown “before” and then a section “after.”  In all actuality, that is before and after Alaska’s ambiguous accident/suicide.  Pulling the student body together to pull the prank of all pranks helps everyone begin the healing process to cope with Alaska’s death.  Miles’s obsession with last words leads to an investigation into Alaska’s death that leads to inconclusive results.  Impression:  Alaska is completely irreverent, and unfortunately, her story can’t be found in a middle school library.  It’s such a shame, because I think there are many readers who could relate to the story on some level.  John Green’s writing is superb, and his characters challenge us to be better people.  I’ve been in love with his writing since A Fault in our Stars.  Suggestions for library setting:  Unfortunately, this can’t be in my middle school library.  I have recommended it to our LEAP teacher, who read it and loved it.  There have been a small handful of students to whom I have recommended this book, based on their love of other similar books like Thirteen Reasons Why. 

Green, John. (2005).  Looking for Alaska.  New York: Dutton Children's.

A collector of famous last words, teenage Miles Halter uses Rabelais's final quote ("I go to seek a Great Perhaps") to explain why he's chosen to leave public high school for Culver Creek Preparatory School in rural Alabama. In his case, the Great Perhaps includes challenging classes, a hard-drinking roommate, elaborate school-wide pranks, and Alaska Young, the enigmatic girl rooming five doors down. Moody, sexy, and even a bit mean, Alaska draws Miles into her schemes, defends him when there's trouble, and never stops flirting with the clearly love-struck narrator. A drunken make-out session ends with Alaska's whispered "To be continued?" but within hours she's killed in a car accident. In the following weeks, Miles and his friends investigate Alaska's crash, question the possibility that it could have been suicide, and acknowledge their own survivor guilt. The narrative concludes with an essay Miles writes about this event for his religion class--an unusually heavy-handed note in an otherwise mature novel, peopled with intelligent characters who talk smart, yet don't always behave that way, and are thus notably complex and realistically portrayed teenagers.

Sieruta, P. D. (2005). Looking for Alaska. Horn Book Magazine, 81(2), 201-202.

 LOOKING FOR ALASKA  The Alaska of the title is a maddening, fascinating, vivid girl seen through the eyes of Pudge (Miles only to his parents), who meets Alaska at boarding school in Alabama. Pudge is a skinny (“irony” says his roommate, the Colonel, of the nickname) thoughtful kid who collects and memorizes famous people’s last words. The Colonel, Takumi, Alaska and a Romanian girl named Lara are an utterly real gaggle of young persons, full of false starts, school pranks, moments of genuine exhilaration in learning and rather too many cigarettes and cheap bottles of wine. Their engine and center is Alaska, given to moodiness and crying jags but also full of spirit and energy, owner of a roomful of books she says she’s going to spend her life reading. Her center is a woeful family tragedy, and when Alaska herself is lost, her friends find their own ways out of the labyrinth, in part by pulling a last, hilarious school prank in her name. What sings and soars in this gorgeously told tale is Green’s mastery of language and the sweet, rough edges of Pudge’s voice. Girls will cry and boys will find love, lust, loss and longing in Alaska’s vanilla-and-cigarettes scent.

Looking for Alaska.  (March 1, 2005).  Kirkus Reviews.  Retrieved from: 
     http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-green/looking-for-alaska-2/