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 What is Paper Towns?[]

Paper Towns is a marvellous book written by John Green. The back of the book says "Quentin Jacobsen has always loved Margo from afar. So when she climbs though his window to summon him on an all-night road trip of revenge he cannot help but follow. But the next morning, Q turns up at school and Margo doesn't. She left clues to her disappearance, like a trail of breadcrumbs for Q to follow".

You will have to read the book to find out the rest. But at the end, Quentin ends up finding her after he followed the clues and he eventually finds her. They also made a movie about it starring Cara Delevingne and Nat Wolff. I hope this article was any help to you.

Plot Summary[]

Paper Towns takes place in Orlando, Florida. The novel begins in a subdivision called Jefferson Park. The narrator, Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, and his neighbour Margo Roth Spiegelman, both young children, go to the park and discover the corpse of Robert Joyner, a divorced man who has committed suicide. The novel then flashes forward to Quentin and Margo as high schoolers who have grown apart. In the middle of a random night Margo shows up at Quentin’s bedroom window dressed like a ninja, with black face paint and black clothes. She convinces him to sneak out and help her get revenge on people she feels have hurt her.

The first characters they visit are Margo’s ex-boyfriend Jase and the girl with whom he was cheating on Margo, Becca. Quentin calls Becca's parents to inform them about their daughter having sex with Jase. As Jase attempts to escape, Quentin takes a picture of him. Then, Quentin and Margo break into Becca's home, graffiti a blue M on her wall, and leave a dead catfish for her. The second person they visit is Karin, a character mentioned only once throughout the story. They leave her a bouquet of flowers, as she is the character who informed Margo that her boyfriend was cheating on her. Upon hearing the news, Margo cursed her in disbelief. After that they go to Jase’s house, break in and leave him a fish and a blue ‘M’. They then visit a character named Lacey, who becomes a more prominent character in the last half of the book. Margo felt that Lacey had never been a good friend to her, and that she had ridiculed her too often and made backhand comments that were truly meant as insults. They leave a fish for her in her car and graffiti a blue ‘M’ on the roof of her car. At 3:15 in the morning, they enter the SunTrust bank building and they relax on one of the higher floors for a short while. This is the first time Margo calls their town a " paper town", describing it as “fake” and “not even hard enough to be made of plastic”. Once they leave the SunTrust building, Margo asks Q on whom he would like to get revenge, and he chooses the high school bully Chuck Parson. Margo and Q sneak into his house, remove one of Chuck’s eyebrows with hair removal cream, and slather Vaseline on all of the door handles in his house. After getting revenge on Chuck they break into SeaWorld, but leave disappointed because none of the animals are in their showcases.

Margo and Q return to their homes close to the time they are supposed to be getting up in the morning to go to school. The next day at school all Q thinks about is how things have changed. He wonders if Margo will start hanging out with him and his friends, Ben and Radar, but Margo doesn’t show up to school that day. After Margo has been missing for three days her parents file a report. Margo has run away four times in the past so her parents are more frustrated than worried. After learning that Margo has run away, Q notices a poster of Woody Guthrie taped to the back of her shades. The poster leads him to a song called Walt Whitman's Niece, which, in turn, leads him to a book of poems, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The poem has highlighted sections that Q believes to be clues left by Margo to lead him to where she is. Q continues to search for clues and finds an address scrawled on a small piece of paper located on his door. Hoping it will lead them to where she is hiding, Q and his friends skip school the following day and go to the place on the piece of paper. They find an old abandoned mini-mall which contains evidence that Margo was recently there, as well as a spray-painted message on the wall that leads him to believe she has committed suicide, and expects him to find her body.

Eventually the clues lead Q to believe that Margo may be hiding out (or buried) in one of the many abandoned subdivision projects around Orlando; what Q’s mother likes to call "pseudovisions". He drives to all of the pseudovisions where he feels she may be hiding, but has no luck locating her. While getting ready for graduation, Q makes a connection using a map he found searching for her, which leads him to discover that Margo has been hiding in a fictional town in New York called Agloe, which was created as a copyright trap by mapmakers. Q, Radar, Ben, and Lacey all opt to skip graduation to drive to New York to search for her. They make the drive from Orlando, Florida to Agloe, New York in just shy of twenty-four hours. They find Margo living in an old dilapidated barn. But instead of being grateful for them finding her, she reacts negatively. Margo had not intended for them to find her. Angry that Margo is not grateful for all their efforts to find her, Radar, Ben, and Lacey leave and spend the night at a motel. Q stays behind and talks things over with Margo. She decides to go to New York City. Margo and Q kiss and Q wants to stay with her but it's implied that he will return home with his friends in the end, possibly to reunite some time in the future, but it is ultimately left ambiguous.

Characters[]

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