Book Review: An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Title: An Abundance of Katherines
Author: John Green
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Library Copy
Books I've read this year: 101

When I was in my MFA program, lots of people did the Chuck Klosterman footnoting thing. I believe that Chuck Klosterman said he ripped it off of David Foster Wallace, who undoubtedly ripped it off of someone else. Regardless of its origins, it's sort of a popular thing these days to write a footnoted essay, or in John Green's case, a footnoted novel. In An Abundance of Katherines, Colin Singleton, a former child prodigy on the brink of going to college, takes it hard when his girlfriend, Katherine IXX, dumps him. So Colin and his friend Hasan get the heck of out Dodge (Chicago) and head south, where they end up in Rural Tennessee. Adventure, hilarity, and coming of age ensues.

If John Green's name weren't on the title of this novel, I probably would not have picked it up, and that would have been fine. His novel The Fault in Our Stars was so good that I set a goal of reading his other novels, and this one is probably my least favorite. Just like I hated the gimmicky footnotes after about ten minutes in graduate school (despite my love of the parenthesis), it quickly wore me down here too. And when Green started adding math to the footnotes? I was a goner. But it's more than just that-- his other books had characters I cared about, plots that threw me for a loop, and in this one, it was mostly about teenagers just hanging out and getting over breakups. There's a place for that kind of writing, but now that I'm approaching my late 30s, probably not a place for me to be reading it.