An Abundance of Katherines: Review and Characterization

        An Abundance of Katherines by John Green was by far one of the best books I've read. It is a feel-good realistic fiction novel that can teach us all a few good lessons. John Green's writing style, however, was what intrigued me the most and made the novel so memorable. Green uses a very comedic tone in his writing and provides a very light-hearted feel. For example, he uses certain phrases that he thinks the reader should understand differently than what they actually mean and puts many footnotes at the bottom of that page for the reader to understand the message he was trying to convey. They were often very silly, but they definitely helped. Along with a comedic tone, he also offers a very "dorky" tone in the book; he incorporated some crazy trivia that nobody would really know unless they spent many hours researching fun facts.

       Now for a brief summary of the book. Colin Singleton is a teen prodigy, as he calls himself, that has been dumped by girls named Katherine 19 times. That's right, NINETEEN TIMES! It's totally insane, but true. John Green himself has been dumped 53 times, so I guess that's where he got this strange idea from. Anyways, Colin is eventually so sick and tired of breakups that him and his best friend Hassan, decide to go on a road trip for their summer break. Their road trip takes them to the smal
l town of Gutshot, Tennessee where they are initially reeled in because the town claims to be the home of the grave of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. They go there and befriend a girl named Lindsey Lee Wells, who's mom, Hollis, eventually gives them both jobs and a place to stay for the summer. 

      Meanwhile, Colin, who really wants to accomplish something brilliant in life and have a "Eureka" moment and "matter" in the world, starts to work on a theorem that predicts any couple's relationship called the "Theorem of Underlying Katherine Probability". While in Gutshot, Colin and Hassan go on many adventures with Lindsey, her jerk of a boyfriend, and some of her friends and learn a lot of new things. Even Hassan, who is very strict about his religion, gets a girlfriend named Katrina who seems to like him but Hassan later finds out that she is cheating on him with Lindsey's boyfriend. Lindsey reveals that she is actually relieved that she's not dating her boyfriend anymore and grows closer and closer to Colin. The two realize that they have a lot in common and confess their love for each other in Lindsey's private cave hideout. At the end of the book, Colin plugs himself and Lindsey into his theorem and calculates that Lindsey will dump him in four days. She doesn't, though. This leaves Colin to realize that life is very unpredictable, and that his theorem can only justify why past relationships have ended, not when new ones will end. 

      Colin is a very dynamic character--he transformed a lot throughout the course of the novel. At the beginning, as a reader, I saw him as a teen prodigy striving to achieve something and have his "Eureka" moment in life. He longed for the moment where he would accomplish something significant and put it into the world. As the story went on, he realized that he doesn't need to achieve something significant in order to matter in the world and that it's really not that important to be recognized by many people. He also comes to realize that life is unpredictable. The only thing that all his theorem could do was tell him why so many Katherines dumped him.
      Lindsey is a very dynamic character as well. It is very prominent in the book that she acts very different around her boyfriend, whose name is also Colin (or TOC as Hassan and Colin called him), than she does around Colin and Hassan. After TOC dumps her, she feels like she has more freedom and that she was restricted the entire time that she was dating TOC. After she realizes that she is only herself with Colin and Hassan, she decides to continue with them on their road trip to "nowhere", which is a symbol that she has finally found her true identity.