An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Author: John Green
Genre: Coming of Age, Road trip
Rating: 9
Teach-ability: 7
Teachable Aspects: Character, plot, Making connections, Genre study-road trips

I've decided to add a new genre. That genre is Road Trip. This book was a required reading in my Young Adult Literature course, and was set up as being a Road Trip novel. I have to admit, for a majority of the book I did not see this as actually being a Road Trip novel, because the actual road tripping part of the road trip was contained to the first couple of chapters. Now that I have finished, I think that the book is worthy of its genre, because (as it was so eloquently stated in my class) the YA Road Trip novel is a marriage between the physical and metaphorical road trip.

I have read just about every book by John Green (although I am still perplexed as so why is name is so large on the cover...) and I actually thought that I had read (and enjoyed) them all, but upon further digging it has been decided that I have not, although I plan to. I really enjoy the way Green writes, its comical, teenaged, but deep as well. His stories/writing is enough the same that you know you're reading a John Green novel, but not enough the same so that it seems as though every novel by him is exactly the same.

One element that I absolutely loved in this book was the addition of footnotes. In this story, our main character is former child prodigy Colin Singleton who is on the heels of a breakup with Katherine number 19. Maybe its because the main character is so smart, and brings so many other elements and thoughts into the story, but most pages are adorned by footnotes with more information of various things. Like William Lyon Mackenzie King was the prime minister of Canada in 1936. Relevance is minimal, but this little snippet of information on the bottom of page 170 is an interesting addition.

Overall I really liked the book, and I think that the content of the book and the additional information could bring a lot to the book if one were to teach it in the classroom. In addition to that the book is just a great read.