Looking For Alaska: John Green

I actually just picked this book up on the way out of the library because I assumed it was a travel guide sort of book. I was delightfully surprised. The book is in an interesting format in that it starts with a number of days before the incident and is in a sort of journal format. Miles Halter goes off to a boarding school for high school, looking for a "great perhaps", which was François Rabelais's last words. He is interested in people's last words and has many famous people's memorized. Miles, who is very slender, gets the nickname "Pudge" and is introduced to his roommate's friends Alaska and Takumi. We learn at this point that the title is referring to this girl who picked out her own name, and not the state of Alaska. We now also know that the journal counting down the days for an incident with Alaska someone couldn't have know when writing the entry. Alaska is unstable and eventually we learn that her instability was caused by watching her mom die when she was a little girl. Her father came home to find her by her dead mother and asked why she didn't call 911. Alaska lives with that guilt. Pudge falls in love with Alaska, as do all the other boys, but Alaska has a boyfriend who goes to school somewhere else. One night she takes a phone call from her boyfriend and then comes back sobbing that she has to leave. The boys create a distraction so Alaska can get off campus after curfew. The next day they learn she was in an accident and died. The boys then try to piece together what happened and the entries start with the increments in # days past the accident. The boys begin to piece together that she had forgotten the anniversary of her mother's death and may have decided to commit suicide running into the cop car. She was very drunk, but the boys try to get that drunk and believe it was still possible to see the car and swerve. The story ends with the same number of days after Alaska's death as it started that number of days before her death. It shows that life goes on, but that they will forever be changed by knowing Alaska and maybe she was Mile's "Great Perhaps" as he will never know what the future with her could have held.