Looking for Alaska: A Banned Book Review

Book Title: Looking for Alaska

Author: John Green

Genre: Young Adult Fiction (coming-of-age story)

Banned Book Ranking: Tied 5th most challenged book in 2022, as tracked by the American Library Association. 

Potentially Objectionable Contents: underage drinking and smoking, drunk driving, sexual content including oral sex and stripping, and discussion of suicide.¹

Looking for Alaska: My Review 

My copy of Looking for Alaska

(Spoiler Alert and Content Warning! I will be giving away key plot points as well as using frank and straightforward sexual language.)

     Prior to reading Looking for Alaska, I was fairly well acquainted with John and Hank Green, a.k.a. the Vlogbrothers, through their Youtube videos. Hank Green is the slightly more sciency/nerdy one, while John Green is the one with an obsession for curing tuberculosis. They belong to the original wave of masterful content creators who made Youtube the video behemoth it is today. And while I was aware that John Green had written some blockbuster books like The Fault in Our Stars, I had never actually read any of them up until now. 

     If there's one thing I love more than watching the Vlogbrothers' Youtube videos, it's reading banned books; so when I learned that John Green's Looking for Alaska was drumming up controversy, I made a mental note of it. I didn't set out to buy the book, but when I saw a cheap paperback copy sitting on the wrong shelf in Walmart, I swooped it up and started reading.

     The first thing to note about this book is that all the characters have nicknames, and these nicknames are used so much that I have forgotten all their actual names and am too lazy to go back and look them up. So I'll be using all the characters' nicknames here. The main character in this book is Pudge. The story is told from his perspective. He's a sixteen-year-old high school student who goes out of state to attend a kind of backwoodsy boarding school. The boarding school was envisioned based off of John Green's own adolescence where he attended Indian Spring's School, an actual backwoodsy boarding school. Here's a few pictures from the Indian Springs School website to help you get the vibe. 





     With those pictures out of the way, I feel no need to elaborate on the scenery of the book. Let's get to the story. As happens when one goes to boarding school, Pudge makes friends with the Colonel (his roommate), Takumi, Lara, and Alaska. It is these friends who welcome Pudge to the school and introduce him to the pastimes of smoking, alcohol, and sex. They are not bad friends, in the sense that they really do seem to care for one another, but they are not exactly paragons of virtue.

     A lot of emphasis among book-banners has been placed on the fact that this book depicts teenage sex, and while that's true, the amount of sex in the book is minuscule in comparison to the amount of smoking and drinking.  The book describes the lengths the students go to hide their contraband on campus, from burying wine bottles at the beach to mixing vodka in their milk to hiding liquor in old Gatorade bottles. They have a little secluded area they go to to smoke. The Colonel shows Pudge how to use the showers in the dorm to hide their smoking. Overall, a significant percentage of this book details how students effectively evade school policy and codes of conduct. And when they do get caught, they don't rat on each other. 

     Then there's drinking, which they do in excess. The characters at times quite deliberately get drunk. To be clear, while this book does not condone underage alcohol consumption, alcohol plays a huge role in the story. In fact, that brings us to the pivotal moment in the book when they all get incredibly drunk one night after the group of friends play a campus prank. In the middle of the night, all of them still drunk, Alaska wakes Pudge and the Colonel up and tells them they have to help her get off campus. They sleepily provide a distraction, and Alaska drives away, still hammered. The next day, the entire school is assembled to inform the students that Alaska died that night in a car accident. 

     To add to the emotional shock that Alaska's death has on Pudge, this event happens right at a pivotal moment in Pudge's sexual awakening. In the first half of the book, Pudge has his first-ever sexual experience with Lara. Lara gives him a blowjob, and since neither of them knows what they are doing, Alaska has to give Lara instructions on how to do it. But while Pudge and Lara have sex, and technically decide to date, Pudge's emotional energy is focused on Alaska, and he ends up cheating with her. They kiss and make out on that drunken night, just hours before Alaska's death. 

     John Green has stated that he structured this part of the story to present a dilemma between sexual gratification and emotional gratification. On the one hand, Pudge gets sexual gratification from Lara, but it's emotionally empty. On the other hand, he gets emotional gratification from Alaska, but they stop short of sex. Then suddenly, the object of Pudge's emotional gratification is dead, and it's somewhat his fault. His sexual interest in Lara disappears. (Actually, I felt bad for Lara in this part of the story. She is completely ignored by Pudge for some time, although Pudge eventually comes around to apologize for ignoring her, and the two eventually do reconcile as friends.)

     While sex, alcohol, and tobacco play a prominent role in this story, and many people will object to this book on those grounds, these elements are all integral to the story that John Green wants to tell. Pudge is experiencing his first taste of freedom away from his family. Here's his chance to live a libertine lifestyle, complete with a total absence of responsibility. And just while it appears he's able to live life without consequences, he gets hit with the reality that he played a role in Alaska's death. Suddenly, every act of instant gratification comes home to roost. 

     This book does not glamorize sex, alcohol, smoking, etc. The waters are muddied only by the fact that Pudge is the one narrating the story, so the book has no internal voice of maturity there to state exactly how the characters' actions are destructive. All we have is Pudge, with all his faults, telling us how he is processing the shock of Alaska's death. Pudge is not a reliable narrator. While his experiments with libertinism end up being destructive, Pudge is not necessarily the person who can tell us that, because this is something he himself is working through. 

     In the first half of the book, the Colonel, Alaska, and Takumi all teach Pudge how to hide contraband. In the second half of the book, Pudge and the Colonel have to hide their secret that they helped Alaska drive away drunk. They bear some responsibility for her death. In addition to this, Alaska had left some clues that she was contemplating suicide. The second half of the story fluctuates between these characters experiencing grief and investigating their friend's death. 

     Pudge's grieving process (and the Colonel's as well) is every bit as juvenile and immature as he is, but I also found it to be real and authentic. His investigation into Alaska's death is fraught with futility, and what was clear to me as I read the second half of this book was not that there is a mystery to Alaska's death - drunk driving deaths are not a mystery to me - but that Pudge desperately needs there to be a mystery to her death. This is the one way he can avoid having to take responsibility. It was also his final attempt to emotionally connect with her, to figure out the meaning of their emotional affair. So even as Pudge and the Colonel vainly sleuth through their evidence and perform faux experiments to reconstruct Alaska's mindset when she died - all of which ends with little to no progress - their motivation felt real and raw as I was reading it. Their grief is immature but not fake.

     In the back of my copy of this book, there's a small Q-and-A section where John Green answers commonly asked questions about the story. He expresses there that it was important to his story that Pudge was not completely innocent of wrongdoing. That night when he helped Alaska drive away drunk, he could have and should have stopped her. With this in mind, John Green has this to say about the moral of the story: "The question for me becomes whether you can find a way to live with yourself, whether forgiveness is still available to you even though the person you need to forgive you is gone. . . . Pudge does eventually find an answer that brings him comfort, but along the way he has to become much more proactive about his life and his choices."² I personally think this is the thesis of the story that John Green wants to tell.

     Running throughout the course of this book, we see Pudge in his religious studies class trying to grapple with the concepts and ideas central to various world religions. The teacher for the class is an old man named Dr. Hyde, who is presented as both stern on one hand and very compassionate on the other. (I cannot help but feel that Dr. Hyde's name and personality both directly allude to the duality of sternness and compassion found in most major world religions.)

     In what is, I think, a brilliant closure to the book, our story ends with an essay Pudge writes for Dr. Hyde's class. In true high school fashion, he writes it at the very last second after having procrastinated for as long as possible. In his essay, Pudge comes to terms with his relationship with Alaska and his role in her death. The essay displays all the simplistic and ill-formed concepts you would expect in a high school religious studies essay. It's full of religious ideas with no actual citations to any religion. It is a heartfelt statement of his grappling with Alaska's death, while simultaneously displaying all the bullshit tactics procrastinators deploy in their essays to avoid admitting they can't cite a single thing they learned in class. It is, I think, brilliant, relatable, and juvenile.³ And in that essay he finally comes to a place of acceptance and says,"I know that she forgives me, just as I forgive her." (Chapter: one hundred thirty-six days after)

     I want to end this review by saying that while I just gave a brief overview of this book, I do not feel like I have described the book with any justice. My purpose of this review was primarily to address the objectionable content in this book so as to contextualize this content for those who have heard about the controversy but didn't know the details. However, I feel like in accomplishing this task, I have so downplayed the characters and their interactions that they have lost their personality. I hope the information I have provided has done some justice to the character of Pudge. Other reviews I have seen online focus on Alaska's character, and I would encourage people to seek out such reviews before coming to a conclusion.

     So what are my thoughts on the age appropriateness and banworthiness of this book? While much focus has been placed on this book's sexual content, the drinking and smoking are, in my opinion, far more pervasive, from start to finish. Of the sexual content in the book, it does not read like an erotic fiction, and I would not call it pornographic. It is, however, straightforward in describing sexual activity and full of the sexual wanderings of a teenage boy's mind, such as the various times that Pudge contemplates how many layers of clothing are between him and Alaska.

     As far as I am aware, this book is sometimes used in high school curricula. A quick Google search indicates it's rated for 9th to 12th grade. I think this is a fair grading, though I personally would gear it toward older high school students. I certainly would not recommend this book for anybody younger than 9th grade. I do not think I myself would have benefitted from reading this book in high school, as many of the challenges Pudge faces in the book are things I wouldn't have been able to relate to until my early 20's. Everyone is different though. And honestly, I didn't think I would benefit from reading The Scarlet Letter in high school either, but to this day it remains one of my high school favorites. 

Footnotes:
1) This is my own list based on my reading of the book. Some people challenging the book have alleged the book has LGBTQ content, which is just plain false.  

2) Q and A pages not numbered for citation. This is part of John Green's response to the question, "Pudge seems to lack any agency over his actions. Every hang-out and prank is planned by others, the Colonel gives him his nickname, etc. Is this intentional?"

^{3) I wrote an essay just like this in college not long after the death of my sister-in-law. It was for my Philosophy of Life and Death class. I wrote a 12-page poem for my final exam. I don't recall using any of the concepts we had actually studied in class, but I just wrote what I needed to write, and my professor was very understanding.}