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Summary
Summary
From the #1 bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars
Michael L. Printz Honor Book
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
Katherine V thought boys were gross
Katherine X just wanted to be friends
Katherine XVIII dumped him in an e-mail
K-19 broke his heart
When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton's type happens to be girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact.
On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight, Judge Judy-loving best friend riding shotgun--but no Katherines. Colin is on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relationship, avenge Dumpees everywhere, and finally win him the girl.
Love, friendship, and a dead Austro-Hungarian archduke add up to surprising and heart-changing conclusions in this ingeniously layered comic novel about reinventing oneself.
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 (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Though Woodman did a strong job on the audio version of Green's Looking for Alaska (see above), the author's second young adult novel proves to be more of a challenge. This follow-up is looser and less traditionally structured, more in the postmodern vein, without a sad and lovable heroine for a narrator to wrap his energies around. There's a much nerdier element to Green's latest hero, teenage prodigy Colin Singleton, and not as much understandable or likeable weirdness in the other characters. Despite these shortcomings, Woodman does manage to carve out a narrow turf of credibility and interest, where young adults who enjoy being tested by their entertainment choices might find some moments of pleasure. Ages 12-up. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(High School) Former child prodigy Colin, faced with the real-world uselessness of his genius for trivia and word games, has no idea what to do with his life. Floundering, he lets his best friend Hassan drag him on a road trip while he attempts to recover from his breakup with Katherine XIX (he only dates girls named Katherine). Visiting the grave of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Tennessee, they befriend the tour guide, Lindsey Lee Wells, and accept summer jobs from her mother. As the three teens grow closer, Colin deals with his Katherine baggage by attempting to crack the code of love with his ""Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability"" (his last chance, he thinks, to ""do something that matters""). Flashbacks to the various Katherine romances flesh out Colin's character (a pitch-perfect blend of self-doubt and oblivious narcissism) and provide hilarious insight into the peculiarities and universalities of insecure love. Hassan, often the butt of his own Muslim jokes, subverts the ""jolly fat guy"" stereotype with a quick wit and mounting frustration with being the sidekick. The final confrontation between Colin and him is the heart of the story, far more affecting than Colin's romantic tribulations. Laugh-out-loud funny, this second novel by the author of Printz winner Looking for Alaska (rev. 3/05) charts a singular coming-of-age American road trip that is at once a satire of and tribute to its many celebrated predecessors. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Gr. 9-12. Green follows his Printz-winning Looking for Alaska0 (2005) with another sharp, intelligent story, this one full of mathematical problems, historical references, word puzzles, and footnotes. Colin Singleton believes he is a washed-up child prodigy. A graduating valedictorian with a talent for creating anagrams, he fears he'll never do0 anything to classify him as a genius. To make matters worse, he has just been dumped by his most recent girlfriend (all of them have been named Katherine), and he's inconsolable. What better time for a road trip! He and his buddy Hassan load up the gray Olds (Satan's Hearse) and leave Chicago. They make it as far as Gutshot, Tennessee, where they stop to tour the gravesite of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and meet a girl who isn't named Katherine. It's this girl, Lindsey, who helps Colin work on a mathematical theorem to predict the duration of romantic relationships. The laugh-out-loud humor ranges from delightfully sophomoric to subtly intellectual, and the boys' sarcastic repartee will help readers navigate the slower parts of the story, which involve local history interviews. The idea behind the book is that everyone's story counts, and what Colin's contributes to the world, no matter how small it may seem to him, will, indeed, matter. An appendix explaining the complex math is "fantastic," or as the anagrammatically inclined Green might have it, it's enough to make "cats faint." --Cindy Dobrez Copyright 2006 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-This novel is not as issue-oriented as Green's Looking for Alaska (Dutton, 2005), though it does challenge readers with its nod to postmodern structure. Right after intellectual child-prodigy Colin Singleton graduates from high school, his girlfriend (who, like the 18 young women and girls whom he claimed as girlfriends over the years, is named Katherine) breaks up with him and sends him into a total funk. His best friend, Hassan, determines that he can only be cured with a road trip. After some rather aimless driving, the two find themselves in Gutshot, TN, where locals persuade them to stay. There, Colin spends his spare time working on a mathematical theorem of love, hypothesizing that romantic relationships can be graphed and predicted. The narrative is self-consciously dorky, peppered with anagrams, trivia, and foreign-language bons mots and interrupted by footnotes that explain, translate, and expound upon the text in the form of asides. It is this type of mannered nerdiness that has the potential to both win over and alienate readers. As usual, Green's primary and secondary characters are given descriptive attention and are fully and humorously realized. While enjoyable, witty, and even charming, a book with an appendix that describes how the mathematical functions in the novel can be created and graphed is not for everybody. The readers who do embrace this book, however, will do so wholeheartedly.-Amy S. Pattee, Simmons College, Boston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Colin Singleton, child prodigy, tries to turn his 19 failed encounters with girls named Katherine into a formula that will predict the outcome of all relationships and elevate him to genius status. He and best friend Hassan take a somewhat non-traditional post-graduation road trip and end up in Gutshot, Tenn., guests of the owner of a factory that makes strings for tampons. Colin's wit, anagrams and philosophical quest for order combine with Lebanese Hassan's Muslim heritage and stand-up comedy routines to challenge the macho posturing of local youth, who are friends of Lindsey, the daughter of their hostess. When the boys are hired to collect oral histories of the town, their attachment to the small-town folk is cemented by cruising main street and hunting wild boar. Relationships develop, as does Colin, whom Lindsey somehow manages to teach how to tell a story, a skill truly lacking earlier. Sustaining the mood of giddy fun and celebratory discovery, Green omits the dark moments and bleak tragedy of his Printz Award-winning debut, Looking for Alaska (2005). There are tender tearful moments of romance and sadness balanced by an ironic tone and esoteric footnotes along with complex math. Fully fun, challengingly complex and entirely entertaining. (Fiction. YA) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
(one) The morning after noted child prodigy Colin Singleton graduated from high school and got dumped for the nineteenth time by a girl named Katherine, he took a bath. Colin had always preferred baths; one of his general policies in life was never to do anything standing up that could just as easily be done lying down. He climbed into the tub as soon as the water got hot, and he sat and watched with a curiously blank look on his face as the water overtook him. The water inched up his legs, which were crossed and folded into the tub. He did recognize, albeit faintly, that he was too long, and too big, for this bathtub--he looked like a mostly grown person playing at being a kid. As the water began to splash over his skinny but unmuscled stomach, he thought of Archimedes. When Colin was about four, he read a book about Archimedes, the Greek philosopher who'd discovered that volume could be measured by water displacement when he sat down in the bathtub. Upon making this discovery, Archimedes supposedly shouted "Eureka!" [1] and then ran naked through the streets. The book said that many important discoveries contained a "Eureka moment." And even then, Colin very much wanted to have some important discoveries, so he asked his mom about it when she got home that evening. "Mommy, am I ever going to have a Eureka moment?" "Oh, sweetie," she said, taking his hand. "What's wrong?" "I wanna have a Eureka Moment, " he said, the way another kid might have expressed longing for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. She pressed the back of her hand to his cheek and smiled, her face so close to his that he could smell coffee and makeup. "Of course, Colin baby. Of course you will." But mothers lie. It's in the job description. Colin took a deep breath and slid down, immersing his head. I am crying, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater. But he wasn't crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she'd taken the part of him that cried. He opened the drain in the tub, stood up, toweled off, and got dressed. When he exited the bathroom, his parents were sitting together on his bed. It was never a good sign when both his parents were in his room at the same time. Over the years it had meant: 1. Your grandmother/grandfather/Aunt-Suzie-whom-you-never-met-but-trust- me-she-was-nice-and-it's-a-shame is dead. 2. You're letting a girl named Katherine distract you from your studies. 3. Babies are made through an act that you will eventually find intriguing but for right now will just sort of horrify you, and also sometimes people do stuff that involves baby-making parts that does not actually involve making babies, like for instance kiss each other in places that are not on the face. It never meant: 4. A girl named Katherine called while you were in the bathtub. She's sorry. She still loves you and has made a terrible mistake and is waiting for you downstairs. But even so, Colin couldn't help but hope that his parents were in the room to provide news of the Number 4 variety. He was a generally pessimistic person, but he seemed to make an exception for Katherines: he always felt they would come back to him. The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn't over, and maybe he could feel her hand in his again and hear her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I-love-you in the very quick and quiet way that she had always said it. She said I love you as if it were a secret, and an immense one. His dad stood up and stepped toward him. "Katherine called my cell," he said. "She's worried about you." Colin felt his dad's hand on his shoulder, and then they both moved forward, and then they were hugging. "We're very concerned," his mom said. She was a small woman with curly brown hair that had one single shock of white toward the front. "And stunned," she added. "What happened?" "I don't know," Colin said softly into his dad's shoulder. "She's just-- she'd had enough of me. She got tired. That's what she said." And then his mom got up and there was a lot of hugging, arms everywhere, and his mom was crying. Colin extricated himself from the hugs and sat down on his bed. He felt a tremendous need to get them out of his room immediately, like if they didn't leave he would blow up. Literally. Guts on the walls; his prodigious brain emptied out onto his bedspread. "Well, at some point we need to sit down and assess your options," his dad said. His dad was big on assessing. "Not to look for silver linings, but it seems like you'll now have some free time this summer. A summer class at Northwestern, maybe?" "I really need to be alone, just for today," Colin answered, trying to convey a sense of calm so that they would leave and he wouldn't blow up. "So can we assess tomorrow?" "Of course, sweetie," his mom said. "We'll be here all day. You just come down whenever you want and we love you and you're so so special, Colin, and you can't possibly let this girl make you think otherwise because you are the most magnificent, brilliant boy--" And right then, the most special, magnificent, brilliant boy bolted into his bathroom and puked his guts out. An explosion, sort of. "Oh, Colin!" shouted his mom. "I just need to be alone," Colin insisted from the bathroom. "Please." When he came out, they were gone. For the next fourteen hours without pausing to eat or drink or throw up again, Colin read and reread his yearbook, which he had received just four days before. Aside from the usual yearbook crap, it contained seventy-two signatures. Twelve were just signatures, fifty-six cited his intelligence, twenty-five said they wished they'd known him better, eleven said it was fun to have him in English class, seven included the words "pupillary sphincter," [2] and a stunning seventeen ended, "Stay Cool!" Colin Singleton could no more stay cool than a blue whale could stay skinny or Bangladesh could stay rich. Presumably, those seventeen people were kidding. He mulled this over--and considered how twenty-five of his classmates, some of whom he'd been attending school with for twelve years, could possibly have wanted to "know him better." As if they hadn't had a chance. But mostly for those fourteen hours, he read and reread Katherine XIX's inscription: Col, Here's to all the places we went. And all the places we'll go. And here's me, whispering again and again and again and again: iloveyou. yrs forever, K-a-t-h-e-r-i-n-e Eventually, he found the bed too comfortable for his state of mind, so he lay down on his back, his legs sprawled across the carpet. He anagrammed "yrs forever" until he found one he liked: sorry fever. And then he lay there in his fever of sorry and repeated the now memorized note in his head and wanted to cry, but instead he only felt this aching behind his solar plexus. Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept thinking about one word--forever--and felt the burning ache just beneath his rib cage.It hurt like the worst ass-kicking he'd ever gotten. And he'd gotten plenty. (1) Greek: "I have found it." (2) More on that later. Excerpted from An Abundance of Katherines 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.
