Review: Paper Towns

           Paper Towns is my second John Green book, and if I didn’t already love the author for his being one of the awesome Vlogbrothers, his books have sealed the deal. While I still liked The Fault in Our Stars a bit more than Paper Towns, it is an excellent book that I thoroughly enjoyed. 

          It follows the story of Quentin Jacobsen, a senior in high school who is madly in love with the absolutely fascinating Margo Roth Spiegelman. He has been content with watching her exploits from afar, until one day she shows up at his window in full ninja garb, and takes him on the one night adventure of a lifetime. And then, as soon as she came, she is gone, leaving a trail of clues that only Quentin can decipher. 

        Paper Towns is definitely a page turner as the mystery rushes to an unsure climax, leaving you unable to do anything but hold on for the ride. The characters feel like real people with real feelings, not merely cardboard cut-outs, which is a good thing in any book and refreshing to find in the YA scene lately. Also, like The Fault in Our Stars, Paper Towns manages to be really funny, adding to the enjoyment tenfold.  

       I can easily see why John Green’s books are so popular, as they are great--funny, poignant, and honest. I am looking forward to reading more. 

~Tessa 

Review--Anything Worth Doing

Lifestyle choices say a lot about a person. One can be defined as a couch potato, a daredevil, or a wallflower, for example. The couch potato’s lofty goals include navigating the TV Guide each night and seeking adventure no further than a flat screen HD, 48 inch. A daredevil looks for thrills anywhere he or she can get them, often with no particular interest in the journey, the rewarding adrenaline rush being the only goal. The wallflower makes an art out of fading into the woodwork and floating through social settings on the periphery. 

Then, there are those people who do what they do in life for the simple reason that they can live life no other way--a calling, a yearning, a passion... it all comes down to the same thing; a need to live life to the fullest, no matter the risks. 

Anything Worth Doing, by Jo Deurbrouck is a story of one such life, a life lived on a river--all rivers, really, but one river, in particular, one river that tempted, rewarded, and eventually punished Clancy Reese. 

“Anything worth doing is worth overdoing” is a maxim common to adventurers, whether it is climbing the highest mountain--without supplemental oxygen, or diving the deepest blue hole, or traversing a frigid Pole, alone. This motto became the driving force for two experienced professional rafting guides, Jon Barker and Clancy Reese, as they embarked on an epic journey, 900 miles of the tumbling, churning, and meandering white waters of the Salmon, Snake, and Columbia Rivers, from their shared source to their final bow at the Pacific Ocean.

Securing the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award, Jo Deurbrouck has landed herself in good company, alongside such masters of adventure literature as Farley Mowat, Greg Child, Joe Simpson, and Henry David Thoreau. While the author’s narrative succeeds in bringing to life a larger-than-life individual, Clancy Reese, the main character is the river, itself, which lives powerfully on every page, through each triumph and up to the ultimate tragedy. 

A lovingly built dory, a speed-record goal, and two devoted men of the river, all help make Anything Worth Doing a gripping account of a rapidly disappearing world, where rivers spill uninhibited and eddy through one of the last remaining expanses of wilderness of the Western United States. Clancy Reese spent a decade in a romance with the mighty Idaho headwaters, and Jo Deubrouck’s homage to his adventurous spirit is a book most definitely “worth doing”.

~Karina