John Green: Contemporary Young Adult Royalty?

I was first introduced to John Green through Facebook before The Fault in Our Stars movie came to be. A friend of mine had recently read it and she decided that it was her duty to flood everyone's newsfeed with extracts from the novel. After reading through her statuses, I was hooked.

When I got my copy of The Fault in Our Stars, I was almost instantly drawn into the novel and connected with the characters. To me 'cancer' was an alien concept. Just a word. However, once you start reading about Hazel Grace and Augustus Waters, John Green will artfully make you feel their sorrows and joys as much as your own. It's one of those rare books where as the characters laugh, you find yourself laughing too and as they cry, you can't suppress your own tears.

After reaching the final page of that book, I vowed to myself to read everything that John Green ever wrote. That very night, I picked up Looking for Alaska.

I had been expecting another masterpiece. Much to my disappointment, I was received by characters as deep as cardboard cut-outs. Was I let down? Yes, but I wasn't going to give up so soon. So after a tediously long read of what were only 150 pages, I started reading Paper Towns. I started noticing too many similarities between the books -- nerdy white guy goes all hopelessly head over heels for the mysterious and messed up hot girl. Sure the specifics were very different, but not at heart. Having similar themes is one thing, but being repetitive? Not good.
Green's redeeming quality is that his voice in all his novels tends to reach out to you on a personal level. Despite some of his books being uncomfortably alike, you can, with some confidence, pick up any of John Green's books and expect to find little parts of you in the characters or even in the stories themselves.

Just because he is a “YA” author, the intellectuals, or more accurately put, the pseudo-intellectuals, tend to write him off as a trivial sort of writer. I wouldn't completely disagree, because while reading Paper Towns (which is about a group of recent graduates who wander from town to town in search of a girl who isn't particularly close to most of them) you do frequently find yourself asking, “Are you kidding me?” Regardless, if the book can make you feel something, to make you laugh or cry, should that not be enough?  

Whether or not John Green does justice to the title of “King of Contemporary YA” is questionable and I'll leave that to individual opinion. Yet, I would recommend everyone to read a John Green novel because when you do, at least you can hope to fall for his work as Hazel Grace did for Augustus, “As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”