An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

 My next banned book is one that I've actually seen being pulled from the shelves. A teacher at my school once complained that John Green novels were inappropriate for middle school students, and our media specialist promptly made them disappear from our library.

To be fair, this teacher had a point. John Green books do contain a lot of swearing, sexual references, and other mature content. However, I deeply hate the idea of getting rid of young adult books that kids actually want to read from a school library. It just smacks of arrogance and condescension. Plus, kids in middle school have heard more than enough swear words and sexual references just by walking in the halls. They might as well improve their literacy skills with it.

I've already read (and enjoyed) most of John Green's novels, so my choices for which book of his to read this month were limited. Luckily, I had An Abundance of Katherines sitting on my shelf, just waiting for me to pick it up. I went into this experience expecting something similar to Paper Towns or Looking for Alaska. Unfortunately, this one ended up falling flat for me.

The novel begins with the protagonist, Colin, getting dumped by his girlfriend of almost a year, Katherine. He has a thing for the name Katherine - he's dated 19 girls with that name in his lifetime - but this Katherine was the one he loved the most. He's just graduated from high school, and this breakup has thrown his plans for the future into disarray. Unsure of how to pull himself out of his despair, he agrees to join his friend Hassan on a spontaneous summer road trip. He figures that doing something completely random and different might help him get over losing the love of his life.

However, this won't be a normal road trip, because Colin isn't your average teenager. He is a child prodigy, meaning that he can learn information quickly and remembers almost all of it. He rattles off lists of facts with a regularity that tends to annoy others; he even won himself a bit of money and notoriety by winning a kiddie game show when he was younger. But as smart as he is, Colin still struggles with insecurities related to his intelligence. He can memorize things, but not create anything new. He is only a prodigy, as he repeatedly points out, not a genius. He worries that other people will surpass him and become more successful in their lives. He worries that he might fail to leave his mark on the world.


So Colin, with all his intelligence and his many quirks and insecurities, embarks on his trip under a dark cloud. He and Hassan wind up in a small town named Gunshot and get a job interviewing the residents there for a history project. They stay with a wealthy woman and her teen daughter, Lindsay, who Colin immediately develops an attraction to, despite the fact that she is not named Katherine and has a steady boyfriend. Still brokenhearted over his ex, and feeling down about his future prospects, he decides to try and develop an equation to predict the length of a relationship. This, he hopes, will be how he leaves his mark.

As Colin works on the Gunshot history project, spends time with his friends, and works on his equation, he starts to figure out some things about himself and the way he should see the world. An Abundance of Katherines is a coming of age story about an unusual kid with a very usual fear - the fear of being left behind and forgotten.

This novel had all the normal pieces of a John Green novel. A quirky, impossibly clever cast of teens? Check. A love-obsessed male protagonist? Check. A popular girl who secretly feels empty inside? Check. A road trip that triggers character transformation? Check. All of his usual tropes were here, but for some reason, this novel wasn't enjoyable for me.

The primary reason for this was undoubtedly Colin's character. He was, to put it simply, completely unlikable. He is actually described as such in the text; Green directly states that people find Colin annoying and boring, that he has no conception of how to tell a story, and that he is incredibly self-centered. This is all true. Green was a little too successful in creating this character. It absolutely makes sense that he would be dumped a lot in his life. He's unbearable. For a work that is primarily character-driven, this is an issue.

The structure of the story is set up to mirror Colin's personality. It's stated that he doesn't know how to tell a story because he is too easily distracted, so the story is out of order and full of digressions. His penchant for spouting random facts is also included in the form of footnotes, which broke the flow of the story for me and didn't come off as cleverly as Green intended. So, since I didn't particularly like Colin's personality, I didn't particularly like his style of narration either. His relationship prediction formula, which took up a lot of pages, was similarly uninteresting to me. It was a boring idea from a boring character that was doomed to failure from the beginning, because one of the lessons Colin didn't already know was "people aren't predictable." You'd think that most people would latch onto that idea before graduating from high school.

In the end, An Abundance of Katherines was only okay. Colin might have been an annoying protagonist, but his friend Hassan was pretty enjoyable to read. There were some funny moments in the story too that helped break up some of the monotony. It wasn't the worse thing young adult novel I've read, but it was far from the best.

 Story issues aside, the truly disappointing thing about this novel is the fact that John Green wrote it. Knowing what he is capable of producing made this book seem especially weak. Even worse, this story made me realize that Green is basically writing the same book over and over again. His cleverness and emotionally complex writing covered for this sameness while I was reading his other works; I either didn't notice or didn't care about the repetition of plot points, characters, and themes. An Abundance of Katherines is missing Green's trademark wit and wisdom, and this unmasked him for me. I couldn't get lost in the story, so I started seeing the flaws.