A-Z Wednesday (L)


A-Z WEDNESDAY
A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Vicky of Reading at the Beach
To join, here's all you have to do: Go to your stack of books and find one whose title starts with the letter of the week.
Post:
1~ a photo of the book
2~ title and synopsis
3~ link(amazon, barnes and noble etc.).
Be sure to visit other participants to see what book they have posted and leave them a comment. (We all love comments, don't we?) Who knows? You may find your next "favorite" book.

THIS WEEK'S LETTER IS: L
Here is my “L” Title:

Looking for Alaska – John Green
160 pages; published 2005
From School Library Journal
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. (Amazon)

7 comments :

gautami tripathy said...

I am yet to get around this book.

A-Z Wednesday: Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

Beth F said...

Great L choice -- I've had Alaska on my MP3 player forever and ever. I need to get to it.

kayerj said...

sounds sad :(

If you want to wander down my road I’m home.

Anonymous said...

I've heard of this. It sounds like it may be something of a tear-jerker, though.

Bryan R. Terry said...

That sounds very interesting. I'll have to keep an eye out for it.

My L Book is HERE

Jenners said...

I read this one and didn't like it quite as much as I thought I would. Did you read it yet?

wendy elizabeth said...

grat cover for cover attraction can I 'borrow' it?