I recently picked up the book Looking for Alaska by John Green and I could not put it down until I finished it. This book takes place in a high school setting, which I could easily relate to because it mirrored my life in countless ways. All of the events that take place in the book are replicates the real world and makes the story believable. I especially liked it because it was not a typical fairytale story with a “larger than life” hero and a perfect ending. The ending was unexpected and not all of the questions got answered. I usually plan out in my head where the book is headed, but this one took me completely by surprise! It had characters that we’re flawed and real human beings. Some had dark pasts, which explained the way they were in the book. Getting to know the characters was one of my favorite parts of this book. John Green did such an amazing job describing them that they almost felt real. He painted a picture in my head and I could almost hear how they would say the words in the story. The way he described Alaska’s “vanilla and cigarette scent” made me feel like I was standing right next to her. She is real in the minds of hundreds of readers out there. He was always so sincere in his writing and I could feel the emotions that he was putting into the words. The characters did not have to say they were sad or happy or whatever emotion they were, I could feel what they were feeling because that is how well John Green conveyed them as. That is what drew me to this novel so much. The depth he put into each individual character was astounding and intriguing. The depth goes much greater than the individual characters too, it goes into human society as a whole. It gets into some deep topics that really caused me to stop and think about life in a different way. These kids go to a religion class and get into topics that question the existence of a God, the suffering of society, and it discusses the thinking of many influential thinkers such as Thomas Edison. They discuss his theory of energy and it how it cannot be created or destroyed and relate that back to the purpose of life and the afterlife. At the end, everything ties together in a loose sort of way. Some ends are tied while other questions will never be answered. There is no way to answer those questions so the characters, along with the reader, just have to live with that. This book is just like life, we don’t have all the answers and it takes peace to accept that.