Book Review: Looking for Alaska by John Green

Title: Looking for Alaska 
Author: John Green
Publisher: Puffin
Genre: YA (contemporary)
Why I read it/how I found it: I recently found the nerdfighter community and I felt I had to read at least one of John Green's books.

Description:
Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet Francois Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps." Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young. Clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy, Alaska will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps. 


Review:
I don't even know where to start with this. This book made me bawl. BAWL. I had to leave company so I could sob. I know reading it through once isn't enough to pick up on the layers of the book, everything that this book can give. It's so powerful, the way the words are used and phrases and made memorable, the quotes of other people/works that find their place, connecting humanity together. The characters are so real, flesh-and-blood. Sometimes they amaze me. Sometimes they aggravate me. Sometimes I want to slap them, and sometimes I want to hug them. But I cried with them. They were flawed, but so humanized. 
The one thing that will stop me from recommending this book to everyone is that there is a lot of cussing and two or three rather sexual scenes that I skimmed over, and I think that quite a few people I know would probably just shut the book there.
And to those who have read Looking for Alaska already, get this: I checked this book out from the library on January 10. I didn't even know. Freaky, right? Yeah, freaky.


Other information: Looking for Alaska has been opted for film by Paramount, but it looks like it's stuck in development. John Green's website is here.