Printz Medal Winner and Honoree Green knows what he does best and delivers once again with this satisfying, crowd-pleasing look at a complex, smart boy and the way he loves. Quentin (Q) has loved Margo Roth Spiegelman since they were kids riding their bikes, but after they discovered the body of a local suicide they never really spoke again. Now it's senior year; Margo is a legend and Q isn't even a band geek (although quirky best friends Ben and Radar are). Then Margo takes Q on a midnight adventure and disappears, leaving convoluted clues for Q. The clues lead to Margo's physical location but also allow Q to see her as a person and not an ideal. Genuineand genuinely funnydialogue, a satisfyingly tangled but not unbelievable mystery and delightful secondary characters (Radar's parents collect black Santas)we've trod this territory before, but who cares when it's this enjoyable? Lighter than Looking for Alaska (2005), deeper than An Abundance of Katherines (2006) and reminiscent of Gregory Galloway's As Simple as Snow (2005)a winning combination. (Mystery. 13 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* Quentin or Q. as everyone calls him has known his neighbor, the fabulous Margo Roth Spiegelman, since they were two. Or has he? Q. can't help but wonder, when, a month before high-school graduation, she vanishes. At first he worries that she might have committed suicide, but then he begins discovering clues that seem to have been left for him, which might reveal Margo's whereabouts. Yet the more he and his pals learn, the more Q. realizes he doesn't know and the more he comes to understand that the real mystery is not Margo's fate but Margo herself enigmatic, mysterious, and so very alluring. Yes, there are echoes of Green's award-winning Looking for Alaska (2006): a lovely, eccentric girl; a mystery that begs to be solved by clever, quirky teens; and telling quotations (from The Leaves of Grass, this time) beautifully integrated into the plot. Yet, if anything, the thematic stakes are higher here, as Green ponders the interconnectedness of imagination and perception, of mirrors and windows, of illusion and reality. That he brings it off is testimony to the fact that he is not only clever and wonderfully witty but also deeply thoughtful and insightful. In addition, he's a superb stylist, with a voice perfectly matched to his amusing, illuminating material.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2008 Booklist

Gr 9 Up-Quentin Jacobsen, 17, has been in love with his next-door neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman, for his entire life. A leader at their Central Florida high school, she has carefully cultivated her badass image. Quentin is one of the smart kids. His parents are therapists and he is, above all things, "goddamned well adjusted." He takes a rare risk when Margo appears at his window in the middle of the night. They drive around righting wrongs via her brilliant, elaborate pranks. Then she runs away (again). He slowly uncovers the depth of her unhappiness and the vast differences between the real and imagined Margo. Florida's heat and homogeneity as depicted here are vivid and awful. Green's prose is astounding-from hilarious, hyperintellectual trash talk and shtick, to complex philosophizing, to devastating observation and truths. He nails it-exactly how a thing feels, looks, affects-page after page. The mystery of Margo-her disappearance and her personhood-is fascinating, cleverly constructed, and profoundly moving. Green builds tension through both the twists of the active plot and the gravitas of the subject. He skirts the stock coming-of-age character arc-Quentin's eventual bravery is not the revelation. Instead, the teen thinks deeper and harder-about the beautiful and terrifying ways we can and cannot know those we love. Less-sophisticated readers may get lost in Quentin's copious transcendental ruminations-give Paper Towns to your sharpest teens.-Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(High School) Green's latest ode to suburban disconnect, feminine inscrutability, and the euphoria of seizing the moment opens with a dusk-'til-dawn spree of inventive mischief and ends with a snort-milk-out-your-nose-hilarious road trip. Though their friendship faltered in adolescence, staid, ironic Quentin has idolized Margo Roth Spiegelman, the enigmatic girl next door, forever. She enlists him for a wildly cathartic night of pranking at the end of their senior year only to disappear the next morning, leaving a breadcrumb trail of obscure clues in her wake. These center on the concept of paper towns, a term used to mean both planned subdivisions ("pseudovisions") that never get built and towns invented by mapmakers to protect a copyright. Both exist only on paper, and this thread of metaphor illuminates the perceived emptiness of the teens' small-town-Florida existence as well as Quentin's growing recognition that he's constructed a mythic Margo who doesn't really exist. As Quentin, his two best friends Ben and Radar, and Margo's confused friend Lacey unravel her plans, they grow closer, imbuing their final days of high school with new meaning. Ultimately, the mystery of Margo proves more compelling than Margo herself -- instead it's the four fumbling detectives, each with their own idiosyncrasies and foibles and secret strengths, who will capture readers' imaginations.From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Green melds elements from his Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines-- the impossibly sophisticated but unattainable girl, and a life-altering road trip--for another teen-pleasing read. Weeks before graduating from their Orlando-area high school, Quentin Jacobsen's childhood best friend, Margo, reappears in his life, specifically at his window, commanding him to take her on an all-night, score-settling spree. Quentin has loved Margo from not so afar (she lives next door), years after she ditched him for a cooler crowd. Just as suddenly, she disappears again, and the plot's considerable tension derives from Quentin's mission to find out if she's run away or committed suicide. Margo's parents, inured to her extreme behavior, wash their hands, but Quentin thinks she's left him a clue in a highlighted volume of Leaves of Grass. Q's sidekick, Radar, editor of a Wikipedia-like Web site, provides the most intelligent thinking and fuels many hilarious exchanges with Q. The title, which refers to unbuilt subdivisions and "copyright trap" towns that appear on maps but don't exist, unintentionally underscores the novel's weakness: both milquetoast Q and self-absorbed Margo are types, not fully dimensional characters. Readers who can get past that will enjoy the edgy journey and off-road thinking. Ages 12-up. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

WITH young adult literature being a genre largely read by young adult women, it's accustomed to female narrators and subjects. And while there are cyclical bursts - we're in one right now - of worrying about the Boy Reader, publishers know there aren't enough of those to keep them in business, and they've got to get those girls. What's a guy-writer to do? He can write for younger children, where the male audience is not yet lost, or he can write in a genre like science fiction or suspense, which hold on to a male readership in a way domestic fiction does not. He can write about girls, of course, althgugh I'm having a hard time coming up with the name of any male author -in the young adult genre who has done this with more than one-off success. Or he can write about what boys find so fascinating about girls. John Green is the master of this. His first novel, "Looking for Alaska," won the Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature in 2006 and told of a boy's obsession with a crazy complicated girl; his second, "An Abundance of Katherines," gave the hero a lot of crazy complicated girls to figure out. The dominant theme of these and his newest book, "Paper Towns," is that getting the girl in the conceptual sense might be more important than getting the girl in the romantic sense; in any case, both are trumped by the boy's realization that what he really got and needed was himself. The new book's opening invocation of the film "Casablanca" - "My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman" is perhaps an indication that all is not going to go smoothly for our boy Quentin. He and Margo were best friends in childhood, but by high school she's queen of the pack and he's hanging out in the band room and into online role-playing games with his equally dorky best friends, Radar and Ben. But come the spring of senior year, Margo drags Quentin out of his room one midnight for a joyride of amazingly inventive revenge on her boyfriend, Jase, who slept with her best friend. Dead catfish are involved, and that's the least of it. Green's evocation of this caper captures the exhilaration of an adolescent allnighter, but when Quentin heads to school the next day, Margo is missing. She's left behind clues - some on purpose, some inadvertent and all as opaque as the girl herself. Much of the mystery hinges on a highlighted copy of "Leaves of Grass" Margo leaves behind, but I can't help feeling that Keats's "Belle Dame Sans Merci" is really the poem that shapes Quentin's quest. Green's "wild-eyed lass" has precedence there, as does Quentin's preoccupation with a girl who never lets you go. A belle dame is missing in Kevin Brooks's "Black Rabbit Summer," too. The morning after a boozy, bleary night at a seedy carnival, local. It Girl Stella Ross, "parading herself like a queen, surrounded by all her servants and worshippers," has disappeared. Stella is kind of a low-rent Paris Hilton (complete with naked pictures on the Internet), but she's the closest thing to a celebrity that the gritty town of St. Leonard's has, and then she turns up dead. The narrator's gentle friend Raymond disappeared that night, top; could he have been connected to Stella's death, given that she was toying with him sans merci right before she went missing? Brooks is an English young adult novelist who, like Robert Cormier, uses the devices of mystery and suspense to externalize the inner turmoil of adolescence. Unlike "Paper Towns," whose where-is-Margo plot is secondary to riffs on relationships and suburbia, "Black Rabbit Summer" is a fairly conventional mystery - there are police interrogations and investigations, even a gypsy fortuneteller. Dark but not deep, it's the more boy-reader-friendly of the two books, with short chapters, lots of dialogue and doomy atmospherics. It doesn't aim so high, but it's probably the better novel. The narration of "Paper Towns" spends too much time in Quentin's head, which, to be sure, is an entertaining place: "Renting a tuxedo seemed to me an excellent way to contract some hideous disease. ... I did not aspire to become the world's only virgin with pubic lice." Brooks doesn't write with the same snap, but he knows how to keep a story going and gathering steam, and plain-speaking has a virtue of its own: " 'I'm a police officer,' " the narrator's father says. " 'I believe in what I do.' He looked at me. 'And you're my son, and I believe in you, too.' " Those are sentiments that get where the boys are, in case you girls are wondering. Roger Sutton is editor in chief of the Horn Book.