YA Book Review: An Abundance of Katherines

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I like clever--and clever books...even better. John Green's An Abundance of Katherines strikes me as the kind of clever young adult readers like. Beyond the clever, An Abundance of Katherines is a fun coming-of-age story.

We following protagonist Colin Singleton on his summer journey with best friend Hassan Harbish. They climb into a car and begin another very American tale: the hero lighting out for the territory. Modern tongue knows it as "the road trip."

Their road trip bears the weight and expectation of helping Colin heal from a recent dumping. Over the course of his life, he has dated (1) nineteen consecutive girls named Katherine...and only ever remembers being the Dumpee, and not the Dumper.

Colin's defining characteristics drive his teen angst: intelligence and promise. Most recently, math consumes his attention as he works on a Theorem to help explain himself, or at the very least, explain his story. He intends to create a Theorem that explains the arc of failed romantic relationships--and he hopes to be able to predict the ending of any one relationship in the future. To test his math, he continues to plug in the circumstances of each and every Katherine who ever dumped him.

John Green writes in an Afterword that he has never been good at math, yet has always been interested by it. He recruited the assistance of a friend and math genius to compose accurate and real formulas as they pertain to Colin's machinations (2). Throughout the graphs, charts, and rough drafts of formulas, the reader is kept apprised of the progress of the Theorem.

As someone who generally found his own teenage relationship with math a mutually conceded anathema, I loved the use of math in this novel. I barely understood the forumlas, but I did not have the to--I understood the story. And that is a lesson that Colin learns.

Math can connect some dots, as can story telling--which is just as prevalent a tool for Green as math.

Colin and Hassan agree to a summer job where they record the stories of the citizens of an old Tennessee town only years from being snuffed out by the economy. The numbers just won't work anymore. The only remaining industry in town is failing and can only keep the town afloat for a few more years. The citizens don't know it--Colin and Hassan don't know it--but the recording of the memories serves to preserve the town and they way things once were...all while Colin struggles to come to terms with his own memories of nineteen doomed relationships.

Colin's developing formula is in a way a record of the memories of his failed relationships--something which seems impossible to calculate. It would appear to be much easier to write a formula that predicts the end of the town's relationship with its citizens. (3)

An additional treat, Green uses footnotes as way of adding author commentary (and humor)...as I've imitated here. I found this another way that Green embedded numbers into the fabric of story telling...as I said earlier, clever.

And I liked clever.

An Abundance of Katherines is clever and entertaining in its use of numbers and story telling--that much is true. Yet, like relationships, An Abundance of Katherines stands strong because it is more than math. As Colin learns, relationships are about much more than numbers--they are about people.

And people, unlike numbers, are very unpredictable.





1. "dated" is a loose term as we are counting girls all the way back into elementary school

2. His friend explains the math at the end of the book. None of it made sense to me even though I read his explanations and enjoyed them.

3. This doesn't happen. I'm just saying...

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YA Book Review: Jasper Jones

Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Printz Honor winner Jasper Jones begins fast--the title character (the town teen pariah) knocks on the bedroom window of a boy he barely knows and leads the protagonist, Charlie, to the dead body of teen female dangling from a noose.

The novel strikes me as a bit of a homage to Mark Twain. While the protagonist reads Puddin' Head Wilson and discusses Twain with his father, much of the novel smacks of the memorable components from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Puddin' Head Wilson.

Jasper Jones himself is cut from the cloth of Twain--part Injun Joe and part Huck, Jasper appears and disappears. He has dragged Charlie into a crime that no one can solve...and by doing so drags the reader into the tension as well. The piecing together of clues and the reasoning he occurs between Jasper and Charlie draws on the litigious merits of Puddin' Head in addition to Atticus Finch (who Charlie also mentions and regales in the novel).

For page upon page, we wait for the other shoe to drop. We wait for someone in charge to discover the body, to find A clue, to approach Jasper or Charlie and bring them in for questioning. We look over our shoulder for the spotter planes, the detectives, the search parties to find the body of adolescent Laura Wishart.

As the tension grows palpable, and as Jasper and Charlie uncover truths even more horrible than the body of the dead girl, author Craig Silvey develops some wonderful complexities of plot among side characters: Jeffrey, Charlie's parents, Jeffrey's parents, and Mad Jack Lionel (the murderous man the town hates and fears). Charlie's own Becky Thatcher, Eliza Wishart, evokes the spirit of Audrey Hepburn, or rather Holly GoLightly, and continues the very vivid resonance of Twain's influence and inspiration on Silvey...not to mention the fact that the hateful, racist, and judgmental town mirrors the hypocrites of St Petersburg, Missouri.

There's even a body of water--although this one resonates more with Marilyn Robinson's wonderful lake of the damp and eerie fictional town of Fingerbone in Housekeeping. Robinson's cold lake swallowed secrets...as does Silvey's.

I really like Jasper Jones--mainly because I loved being yanked into adventure immediately, and I thoroughly enjoyed the characters. I felt compassion for Mad Jack; I laughed at and with Jeffrey; bitterness for the townspeople just to name a few emotions.

"By Jingo!" to inoke The Adventures of Tom Sawyer...this is an entertaining coming-of-age adventure combining coming-of-age, crime, and the passage from innocence to experience.

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