“The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle,” says Nat Wolff in the first seconds of the first trailer for Paper Towns. “And my miracle was: I ended up living across the street from Margo Roth Spiegelman.” If you can’t already tell, Paper Towns is an adaptation of a John Green novel (such a statement as this oozes John Green-iness). It’s the second of his young adult novels to be adapted in as many years.
And why not? The Fault in our Stars, last year’s drama about kids with cancer was a massive hit with audiences and well liked by critics (though our feelings were mixed). Teenage realism is having a moment in American fiction and film, and it’s certainly not a surprise to see Green’s work continue to hit the screen.
Which isn’t to say that Paper Towns will be a successful movie. The trailer is bland (though the actors look like actual high school students, so major bonus points), and the story it adapts is simultaneously too plotty and too thin to stand for a YA movie. Still, as far as Green’s books go, this one is my favorite.
In the canon of John Green’s high-school fiction, I suppose Paper Towns is a minor work. It’s not a beloved, award winning favorite like Looking for Alaska, nor was it the massive cultural smash of The Fault in our Stars. Like these, it’s not over-reliant on witticism, nor is it overwrought melodrama.
Rather, Paper Towns is a story about a boy looking for a girl he thinks he knows, and realizing how wrong that impression is. That’s about it. John Green is at his best when he’s breaking down the romantic idealism of young male desire, and that is basically the object of Paper Towns. If that holds for the film, then it might be worth a visit.
Paper Towns is the first of John Green’s books I read, and is still my favorite. I’m curious on how it will fare at the box office; there’s a reason Green’s success came with a book about kids with cancer since his other works are harder to pin down with a solid hook. Just as adults want more variety in their movies, I think teen audiences deserve variety too. Quieter films like Tiger Eyes and If I Stay have their place too. For that reason, I hope the film does well.