Module 5: Looking for Alaska

Book Cover Image:

Book Summary:

This is the story of a teenage boy who has recently moved from public to private school. The story displays his experiences in his new school from the average everyday moments to the fun and full of excitement pranks to the tragic and inexplicable hurts that occur in friendship. The story, in its wide variety of emotions, details Mile's deepest, hardest moments in full and living color, most of which find their center in Alaska Young. His encounters with her shape his character throughout the text and shape his future and perspective on life. 

APA Reference of Book:

Green, J. (2005). Look for Alaska. New York, NY: Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Impressions:

My major impression of this book is that it is rough on the reader. There is nothing spared in terms of emotion and experience. John Green is an expert at reality and chooses the harshest light with which to examine and detail it. This story is no different than others he has written in that sense. The language is challenging and requires much of the reader, however, the characters and their experiences are deep and provoke the reader to move forward. The style moves from prose to letters and a few times throughout the text, which offers some freshness to the story as a whole. It makes it feel more realistic, as if that is needed. All in all, I think the reality of the story is necessary for young readers, but the content will be controversial to many. Definitely a good one for more mature collections, but due to the language level and extreme content, perhaps a younger collection would not be the best fit for this text.

Professional Review:

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.

Reference: 

(2005). HornBook. Retrieved from www.titlewave.com 

Library Uses:

This text could be used in a lesson on the importance of word choice. Students could be given the chance to search and find excellent word choice within the text in order to discuss how powerful it can be to a story as whole.