Paper Towns

Paper Towns was published on 16 October 2008 by Dutton Books and is John Green's third novel. Green was already known for young adult fiction and for the online video project he ran with his brother, and this book arrived before the enormous audience that came with The Fault in Our Stars. It is a mystery in structure: a disappearance, a set of clues, a road trip with a deadline and a friend group that does the detective work together.

The novel is also an argument about the person everyone has been looking at. Margo is a legend in her high school, and the book's interest is in what has been built on top of her by other people, including the narrator, who has spent years admiring a version of her that she did not write. Green uses Walt Whitman's poetry as the key the characters find in the clues, and the destinations in the second half are real places in the American south, including the abandoned subdivisions that give the novel its title.

Green has said the book grew out of his own experience of moving to a new state and of a paper town he discovered in Florida. It was adapted into a film in 2015. It contains the road trip and the graduation-year material of his other novels, and its ending is deliberately less tidy than the genre usually permits. The last part of the book is also an argument with the idea of the manic pixie dream girl, which is the phrase the novel is usually discussed alongside.