An Abundance of Katherines: a brief review

taken from amazon.com

This is the vacation edition of Book Reviews by Andrea, coming to you from mostly sunny and sometimes extremely stormy Florida, where I'm visiting the hubs while he's on a long business trip. I brought quite the stack of books with me (both on my kindle and off my bookshelves), thinking that I would just sit and read all day long while the hubs was at work. I did manage to do that the first day, but he's actually gotten a lot more time off than I anticipated since then and I'm not complaining at all because I obviously would rather spend time with him. I finished one book so far, though :)

The last of John Green's books for me to read (not counting the one he wrote with David Levithan), An Abundance of Katherines, is the story of child prodigy Colin Singleton and the 19 girlfriends he's had over the course of his life. The real kicker is that all 19 ex-girlfriends were named Katherine. It seems that at some point Colin decided (subconsciously or otherwise) that he could only date girls named Katherine. Meanwhile, he has been pursuing a future the proves his genius status rather than simply being a child prodigy with no real accomplishments. When he and his best friend Hassan decide to take a road trip following the traumatic break-up of Katherine XIX, they end up stopping in Gutshot, Tennessee, a very small rural town with all kinds of back-woods characters that end up leading them on a whole different kind of adventure than they'd planned.

So here's the thing. I've talked about my love of The Fault in Our Stars, and I've mentioned my love of Looking for Alaska despite my lack of an actual official review on here because I read it before I started blogging again. I loved both of them - loved his writing style, loved the way he writes and creates characters, love the way they rip my heartstrings right out of my chest - and told many people that I love his books because I just assumed I'd one day love the other half of them too. But then I read Paper Towns pretty recently and wasn't crazy in love with it. I actually bordered on not liking it, which really bummed me out. I went into this one a little bit more tentatively, just in case I didn't like this one either. As it turns out, my official opinion is as follows: I liked it more than Paper Towns but less than Looking for Alaska and much less than The Fault in Our Stars. (For the record, I'm not really someone who thinks you should compare a writer's work against each other instead of just taking them as unique pieces in his/her portfolio...it just sometimes ends up working out that way anyway.) I laughed quite a bit, I liked the characters but didn't love them as much as, say, Gus and Hazel, and I was appropriately surprised by a couple of minor twists. The heartache and just complete rip-your-guts-out effect I mentioned earlier were noticeably absent in this one, which I think I both appreciated and missed. My biggest issue/annoyance with this book, though, was Green's use of footnotes throughout the entire book; by the time I'd get to the end of the chapter and would see what the notes were I would almost always have forgotten what they were referencing, and since I read it on my Kindle I couldn't really flip back and forth too easily. Other than that, though, it's a cute story and I would recommend it. I'd just recommend The Fault in Our Stars more, that's all.