Looking for Alaska: A Review

Looking for Alaska, written by John Green, is 221 pages long. The story takes place at a boarding school called Culver Creek in Alabama, although Culver Creek is actually a pen name for a real boarding school in the state known as Indian Springs, where John Green went.

The main character in the story is Miles Halter, a small, skinny, and relatively unpopular boy who is obsessed with last words. He has just decided to enroll at Culver Creek to seek the “Great Perhaps,” which involves the last words of Francois Rebelais. Alaska Young, clever, mischievous, and notoriously attractive, ends up becoming Miles’ friend, although she has some unknown, disturbing quality. Miles’ roommate, The Colonel, as he is known, is infamous for pulling pranks.
From the very beginning of the book, it is evident that Miles feels awkward at his current school and is overall unremarkable. His mother throws him a going-away party for boarding school, but only one of his classmates, and her boyfriend, attend for a short while. Miles’ father also went to Culver Creek, and he warns Miles to stay out of trouble, although his advice is… not exactly taken.

During Miles’ first night at Culver Creek, the Wednesday Warriors (the non-boarding rich kids) duct tape his hands, feet, and mouth and throw him into the school lake, where a swan eager to attack resides. After barely managing to make his way out of the lake alive, Miles returns soaked and shivering to his room, where the Colonel is waiting. The Colonel explains that there has been a long-time feud between the “scholarship kids” and the Wednesday Warriors, and Miles and he become good friends as they begin to create a prank to get back at the Warriors.

They end up setting off a series of fireworks and replacing one of the Weekday Warrior’s shampoos… while Alaska completes the most conniving and cunning prank. To avoid getting caught, they spend some time at the Colonel’s house. One of the most important “rules” among the group is taking the blame for each other and backing each other up.

The climax of the book is when Alaska, abstruse as ever, wakes up after getting drunk and sleeping most of the night. She is crying hysterically, and keeps murmuring that she forgot something, sparked by a drawing of a flower. The Colonel and Miles, both suffering from hangovers themselves, and familiar with Alaska’s unpredictability, do not stop her as she leaves, behind the wheel, to go to some unknown place.

The Colonel and Miles later realize that she was going to put flowers on her mother’s grave, which she had forgotten to do a few days earlier on the anniversary of her mother’s death. When Alaska was little, her mom had an aneurysm, but she was so frightened she didn’t call 911, and her dad was not there. This always haunted her, and was probably why she was so upset she forgot about her mother’s death anniversary.

On the way to her mother’s grave, something happens to Alaska that changes Miles and the Colonel forever. The last few paragraphs of the book include Miles’ essay at the culmination of the school year. There he addresses Simon Bolivar’s last words (Alaska’s personal favorite) “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!” As Alaska says, “That’s the mystery, isn’t it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape—the world or the end of it?”
And Miles responds in his essay “Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of the endless maze and pretend that I was not lost, but home.” But ultimately, Miles realizes, there is no beginning or end to the labyrinth. “If you take Alaska’s genetic code and you add her life experiences and her relationships with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts.” Alaska had changed him forever.

The title of the book, Looking for Alaska, was significant because Miles and The Colonel never really understood Alaska, and yet she changed them in permanent and life-altering ways. They continued to look for Alaska in themselves and the way she affected the world around her.
Looking for Alaska is one of my favorite books because it offers a new perspective on the things which are inevitably a part of life: friendships and grief and forgiveness. John Green crafts a mesmerizing story which dares to ask the questions we are so often afraid to confront.

How would you respond to the quote “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!” Do you agree with Alaska or Miles, or do you have a completely different opinion?

For those of you who have read the book, what did you think of it? What do you think really happened to Alaska?