Monday, March 03, 2008

What Mrs N's Been Reading - An Abundance of Katherines


Just finished John Green's An Abundance of Katherines. Wasn't too crazy about this one. I finished it, so it's not that it was bad, but it wasn't one that I was anxious to get back to between readings. It's the story of just-graduated, former child prodigy, Colin, and his slacker friend Hassan. Colin has only ever had girls named Katherine as a girlfriend. He has just been dumped by Katherine XIX, as he refers to her, and decides to go on a road trip to nowhere in particular with Hassan. They end up stopping in a tiny town in Tennessee. In an attempt to make his mark on the world, and fill the void left by Katherine XIX, Colin decides to try to mathematically model relationships, so that one could accurately predict the length of the relationship and who would be the dumper and dumpee. There's actually a fairly lengthy explanation of the math in the appendix. Because you're dealing with a child prodigy who is fluent in a number of languages, you learn a few good insults in languages that the people you hurl them at are unlikely to understand. There also some interesting bits of trivia in the footnotes, if you're into that sort of thing. I guess what knocked this book down a couple of points in my book, was that the author threw some mildly crude stuff in there, for no really good reason - just to try to be cool. Just because it seemed forced, it annoyed me. Otherwise, I think I would have liked this book more. All in all, not bad, just not on my list of favorites.

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