Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | SCD TEEN FICTION GRE 7 DISCS | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life - he follows. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees of the girl he thought he knew.
Summary
Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life - dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge - he follows. After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues - and they're for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees of the girl he thought he knew. Printz medalist John Green returns with the brilliant wit and searing emotional honesty that have inspired a new generation of listeners.
Author Notes
John Green was born in Indianapolis, Indiana on August 24, 1977. He graduated from Kenyon College in 2000 with a double major in English and religious studies. Before becoming a writer, he was a publishing assistant and production editor for Booklist, which is a book review journal. His first novel, Looking for Alaska, was published in 2005 and won the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in Young Adult literature in 2006. His other works include An Abundance of Katherines, a 2007 Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book; Paper Towns, which won the 2009 Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Novel and the 2010 Corine Literature Prize; and The Fault in Our Stars, which was a New York Times Best Seller. He is also the co-author, with David Levithan, of Will Grayson, Will Grayson.
Two of John Green's titles, The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns, have been made into major motion pictures. His title, An Abundance of Katherines, made the New York Times Best Seller List. Paper Towns made The New Zealand Best Seller List 2015.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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
Horn Book Review
(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.
Booklist Review
*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
New York Review of Books Review
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.
School Library Journal Review
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.
Kirkus Review
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.
Excerpts
Excerpts
PROLOGUE The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. 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. Our subdivision, Jefferson Park, used to be a navy base. But then the navy didn't need it anymore, so it returned the land to the citizens of Orlando, Florida, who decided to build a massive subdivision, because that's what Florida does with land. My parents and Margo's parents ended up moving next door to one another just after the first houses were built. Margo and I were two. Before Jefferson Park was a Pleasantville, and before it was a navy base, it belonged to an actual Jefferson, this guy Dr. Jefferson Jefferson. Dr. Jefferson Jefferson has a school named after him in Orlando and also a large charitable foundation, but the fascinating and unbelievable-but-true thing about Dr. Jefferson Jefferson is that he was not a doctor of any kind. He was just an orange juice salesman named Jefferson Jefferson. When he became rich and powerful, he went to court, made "Jefferson" his middle name, and then changed his first name to "Dr." Capital D . Lowercase r . Period. So Margo and I were nine. Our parents were friends, so we would sometimes play together, biking past the cul-de-sacced streets to Jefferson Park itself, the hub of our subdivision's wheel. I always got very nervous whenever I heard that Margo was about to show up, on account of how she was the most fantastically gorgeous creature that God had ever created. On the morning in question, she wore white shorts and a pink T-shirt that featured a green dragon breathing a fire of orange glitter. It is difficult to explain how awesome I found this T-shirt at the time. Margo, as always, biked standing up, her arms locked as she leaned above the handlebars, her purple sneakers a circuitous blur. It was a steam-hot day in March. The sky was clear, but the air tasted acidic, like it might storm later. At the time, I fancied myself an inventor, and after we locked up our bikes and began the short walk across the park to the playground, I told Margo about an idea I had for an invention called the Ringolator. The Ringolator was a gigantic cannon that would shoot big, colored rocks into a very low orbit, giving Earth the same sort of rings that Saturn has. (I still think this would be a fine idea, but it turns out that building a cannon that can shoot boulders into a low orbit is fairly complicated.) I'd been in this park so many times before that it was mapped in my mind, so we were only a few steps inside when I began to sense that the world was out of order, even though I couldn't immediately figure out what was different. "Quentin," Margo said quietly, calmly. She was pointing. And then I realized what was different. There was a live oak a few feet ahead of us. Thick and gnarled and ancient-looking. That was not new. The playground on our right. Not new, either. But now, a guy wearing a gray suit, slumped against the trunk of the oak tree. Not moving. This was new. He was encircled by blood; a half-dried fountain of it poured out of his mouth. The mouth open in a way that mouths generally shouldn't be. Flies at rest on his pale forehead. "He's dead," Margo said, as if I couldn't tell. I took two small steps backward. I remember thinking that if I made any sudden movements, he might wake up and attack me. Maybe he was a zombie. I knew zombies weren't real, but he sure looked like a potential zombie. As I took those two steps back, Margo took two equally small and quiet steps forward. "His eyes are open," she said. "Wegottagohome," I said. "I thought you closed your eyes when you died," she said. "Margowegottagohomeandtell." She took another step. She was close enough now to reach out and touch his foot. "What do you think happened to him?" she asked. "Maybe it was drugs or something." I didn't want to leave Margo alone with the dead guy who might be an attack zombie, but I also didn't care to stand around and chat about the circumstances of his demise. I gathered my courage and stepped forward to take her hand. "Margowegottagorightnow!" "Okay, yeah," she said. We ran to our bikes, my stomach churning with something that felt exactly like excitement, but wasn't. We got on our bikes and I let her go in front of me because I was crying and didn't want her to see. I could see blood on the soles of her purple sneakers. His blood. The dead guy blood. And then we were back home in our separate houses. My parents called 911, and I heard the sirens in the distance and asked to see the fire trucks, but my mom said no. Then I took a nap. Both my parents are therapists, which means that I am really goddamned well adjusted. So when I woke up, I had a long conversation with my mom about the cycle of life, and how death is part of life, but not a part of life I needed to be particularly concerned about at the age of nine, and I felt better. Honestly, I never worried about it much. Which is saying something, because I can do some worrying. Here's the thing: I found a dead guy. Little, adorable nine-year-old me and my even littler and more adorable playdate found a guy with blood pouring out of his mouth, and that blood was on her little, adorable sneakers as we biked home. It's all very dramatic and everything, but so what? I didn't know the guy. People I don't know die all the damned time. If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I'd be crazier than a shithouse rat. That night, I went into my room at nine o'clock to go to bed, because nine o'clock was my bedtime. My mom tucked me in, told me she loved me, and I said, "See you tomorrow," and she said, "See you tomorrow," and then she turned out the lights and closed the door almost-all-the-way. As I turned on my side, I saw Margo Roth Spiegelman standing outside my window, her face almost pressed against the screen. I got up and opened the window, but the screen stayed between us, pixelating her. "I did an investigation," she said quite seriously. Even up close the screen broke her face apart, but I could tell that she was holding a little notebook and a pencil with teeth marks around the eraser. She glanced down at her notes. "Mrs. Feldman from over on Jefferson Court said his name was Robert Joyner. She told me he lived on Jefferson Road in one of those condos on top of the grocery store, so I went over there and there were a bunch of policemen, and one of them asked if I worked at the school paper, and I said our school didn't have a paper, and he said as long as I wasn't a journalist he would answer my questions. He said Robert Joyner was thirty-six years old. A lawyer. They wouldn't let me in the apartment, but a lady named Juanita Alvarez lives next door to him, and I got into her apartment by asking if I could borrow a cup of sugar, and then she said that Robert Joyner had killed himself with a gun. And then I asked why, and then she told me that he was getting a divorce and was sad about it." She stopped then, and I just looked at her, her face gray and moonlit and split into a thousand little pieces by the weave of the window screen. Her wide, round eyes flitted back and forth from her notebook to me. "Lots of people get divorces and don't kill themselves," I said. "I know ," she said, excitement in her voice. " That's what I told Juanita Alvarez. And then she said . . ." Margo flipped the notebook page. "She said that Mr. Joyner was troubled. And then I asked what that meant, and then she told me that we should just pray for him and that I needed to take the sugar to my mom, and I said forget the sugar and left." I said nothing again. I just wanted her to keep talking--that small voice tense with the excitement of almost knowing things, making me feel like something important was happening to me. "I think I maybe know why," she finally said. "Why?" "Maybe all the strings inside him broke," she said. While I tried to think of something to say in answer to that, I reached forward and pressed the lock on the screen between us, dislodging it from the window. I placed the screen on the floor, but she didn't give me a chance to speak. Before I could sit back down, she just raised her face up toward me and whispered, "Shut the window." So I did. I thought she would leave, but she just stood there, watching me. I waved at her and smiled, but her eyes seemed fixed on something behind me, something monstrous that had already drained the blood from her face, and I felt too afraid to turn around to see. But there was nothing behind me, of course--except maybe the dead guy. I stopped waving. My head was level with hers as we stared at each other from opposite sides of the glass. I don't remember how it ended--if I went to bed or she did. In my memory, it doesn't end. We just stay there, looking at each other, forever. Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one. PART ONE The Strings 1. The longest day of my life began tardily. I woke up late, took too long in the shower, and ended up having to enjoy my breakfast in the passenger seat of my mom's minivan at 7:17 that Wednesday morning. I usually got a ride to school with my best friend, Ben Starling, but Ben had gone to school on time, making him useless to me. "On time" for us was thirty minutes before school actually started, because the half hour before the first bell was the highlight of our social calendars: standing outside the side door that led into the band room and just talking. Most of my friends were in band, and most of my free time during school was spent within twenty feet of the band room. But I was not in the band, because I suffer from the kind of tone deafness that is generally associated with actual deafness. I was going to be twenty minutes late, which technically meant that I'd still be ten minutes early for school itself. As she drove, Mom was asking me about classes and finals and prom. "I don't believe in prom," I reminded her as she rounded a corner. I expertly angled my raisin bran to accommodate the g-forces. I'd done this before. "Well, there's no harm in just going with a friend. I'm sure you could ask Cassie Hiney." And I could have asked Cassie Hiney, who was actually perfectly nice and pleasant and cute, despite having a fantastically unfortunate last name. "It's not just that I don't like prom. I also don't like people who like prom," I explained, although this was, in point of fact, untrue. Ben was absolutely gaga over the idea of going. Mom turned into school, and I held the mostly empty bowl with both hands as we drove over a speed bump. I glanced over at the senior parking lot. Margo Roth Spiegelman's silver Honda was parked in its usual spot. Mom pulled the minivan into a cul-de-sac outside the band room and kissed me on the cheek. I could see Ben and my other friends standing in a semicircle. I walked up to them, and the half circle effortlessly expanded to include me. They were talking about my ex-girlfriend Suzie Chung, who played cello and was apparently creating quite a stir by dating a baseball player named Taddy Mac. Whether this was his given name, I did not know. But at any rate, Suzie had decided to go to prom with Taddy Mac. Another casualty. "Bro," said Ben, standing across from me. He nodded his head and turned around. I followed him out of the circle and through the door. A small, olive-skinned creature who had hit puberty but never hit it very hard, Ben had been my best friend since fifth grade, when we both finally owned up to the fact that neither of us was likely to attract anyone else as a best friend. Plus, he tried hard, and I liked that--most of the time. "How ya doin'?" I asked. We were safely inside, everyone else's conversations making ours inaudible. "Radar is going to prom," he said morosely. Radar was our other best friend. We called him Radar because he looked like a little bespectacled guy called Radar on this old TV show M*A*S*H , except 1. The TV Radar wasn't black, and 2. At some point after the nicknaming, our Radar grew about six inches and started wearing contacts, so I suppose that 3. He actually didn't look like the guy on M*A*S*H at all, but 4. With three and a half weeks left of high school, we weren't very well going to renickname him. "That girl Angela?" I asked. Radar never told us anything about his love life, but this did not dissuade us from frequent speculation. Ben nodded, and then said, "You know my big plan to ask a freshbunny to prom because they're the only girls who don't know the Bloody Ben story?" I nodded. "Well," Ben said, "this morning some darling little ninth-grade honeybunny came up to me and asked me if I was Bloody Ben, and I began to explain that it was a kidney infection, and she giggled and ran away. So that's out." In tenth grade, Ben was hospitalized for a kidney infection, but Becca Arrington, Margo's best friend, started a rumor that the real reason he had blood in his urine was due to chronic masturbation. Despite its medical implausibility, this story had haunted Ben ever since. "That sucks," I said. Ben started outlining plans for finding a date, but I was only half listening, because through the thickening mass of humanity crowding the hallway, I could see Margo Roth Spiegelman. She was next to her locker, standing beside her boyfriend, Jase. She wore a white skirt to her knees and a blue print top. I could see her collarbone. She was laughing at something hysterical--her shoulders bent forward, her big eyes crinkling at their corners, her mouth open wide. But it didn't seem to be anything Jase had said, because she was looking away from him, across the hallway to a bank of lockers. I followed her eyes and saw Becca Arrington draped all over some baseball player like she was an ornament and he a Christmas tree. I smiled at Margo, even though I knew she couldn't see me. "Bro, you should just hit that. Forget about Jase. God, that is one candy-coated honeybunny." As we walked, I kept taking glances at her through the crowd, quick snapshots: a photographic series entitled Perfection Stands Still While Mortals Walk Past. As I got closer, I thought maybe she wasn't laughing after all. Maybe she'd received a surprise or a gift or something. She couldn't seem to close her mouth. "Yeah," I said to Ben, still not listening, still trying to see as much of her as I could without being too obvious. It wasn't even that she was so pretty. She was just so awesome, and in the literal sense. And then we were too far past her, too many people walking between her and me, and I never even got close enough to hear her speak or understand whatever the hilarious surprise had been. Ben shook his head, because he had seen me see her a thousand times, and he was used to it. "Honestly, she's hot, but she's not that hot. You know who's seriously hot?" "Who?" I asked. "Lacey," he said, who was Margo's other best friend. "Also your mom. Bro, I saw your mom kiss you on the cheek this morning, and forgive me, but I swear to God I was like, man, I wish I was Q. And also, I wish my cheeks had penises ." I elbowed him in the ribs, but I was still thinking about Margo, because she was the only legend who lived next door to me. Margo Roth Spiegelman, whose six-syllable name was often spoken in its entirety with a kind of quiet reverence. Margo Roth Spiegelman, whose stories of epic adventures would blow through school like a summer storm: an old guy living in a broken-down house in Hot Coffee, Mississippi, taught Margo how to play the guitar. Margo Roth Spiegelman, who spent three days traveling with the circus--they thought she had potential on the trapeze. Margo Roth Spiegelman, who drank a cup of herbal tea with The Mallionaires backstage after a concert in St. Louis while they drank whiskey. Margo Roth Spiegelman, who got into that concert by telling the bouncer she was the bassist's girlfriend, and didn't they recognize her, and come on guys seriously, my name is Margo Roth Spiegelman and if you go back there and ask the bassist to take one look at me, he will tell you that I either am his girlfriend or he wishes I was, and then the bouncer did so, and then the bassist said "yeah that's my girlfriend let her in the show," and then later the bassist wanted to hook up with her and she rejected the bassist from The Mallionaires . The stories, when they were shared, inevitably ended with, I mean, can you believe it? We often could not, but they always proved true. And then we were at our lockers. Radar was leaning against Ben's locker, typing into a handheld device. "So you're going to prom," I said to him. He looked up, and then looked back down. From the Trade Paperback edition. Excerpted from Paper Towns by John Green All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
