Book Blog #109: Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

Title: Will Grayson, Will Grayson
Author: John Green and David Levithan
# of Pages: 310 (paperback)
Genre: YA, Contemporary, Romance
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Synopsis: will grayson, meet will grayson

One cold night, in a most unlikely corner of Chicago, two strangers cross paths. Two teens with the same name, running in two very different circles, suddenly find their lives going in new and unexpected directions, culminating in heroic turns-of-heart and the most epic musical ever to grace the high school stage.
Review: This review contains spoilers about writing style. Plot spoilers will be hidden.

This book contains sexual content, foul language, and other mature content. If you don't think you can handle that, look elsewhere.

I almost gave this book two stars. Through most of the book, I was pretty confident with my decision. It wasn't until I reached the last ten pages did I suddenly change my mind and gave three.  The ending was touching!

When I read the first two chapters of this book, I noticed a distinction between them in writing style. Since this book is co-written, I had a sneaking suspicion that John wrote every other chapter with David writing the chapters John did not...

I finally decided to it up and find out once and for all if I was correct and if my theory that the odd numbered chapters were written by John (as they seemed to have his writing style). And, what do you know? I was indeed correct.

I was not impressed with what Levithan did with his chapters. Pretty much all of his chapters were in lowercase (yes, including the words in the beginning of the sentence) and the dialogue was in chatroom format, even when the characters were not talking in a chatroom. I understand that the author may have intended the writing style to reflect the his Will Grayson, but it was just really annoying and made it harder for me to connect to the characters. There are more effective ways to show aspects of a character, and this isn't one of them.

However, there was one quote I enjoyed from Levithan's chapters:

-"we're always having this conversation. but if we keep focusing on why you have it so bad, you'll never realize how you could have it so good." (Levithan 243).

I noticed that will grayson didn't have a lot of self-confidence and, to be frank, was annoyingly depressed most of the time. This quote accurately demonstrates what I think of depression. People, including me sometimes, are always thinking about how terrible their life is and don't pay attention to the great parts of their life. will grayson, for example, has a GREAT boyfriend and an accepting mother, but he doesn't appreciate them as much as he should. will grayson is one of those people who thinks that no one, such as Tiny, can possible understand the "misery" he feels. However, just because Tiny is happy a lot of the time doesn't mean he doesn't feel the pains of life. The difference between Tiny and will is that Tiny is willing to enjoy life. He isn't going to let the bad part of life get him down because, after all, you only live once. You might as well have fun doing it.

Even though this is not one of my favorite John Green books, I do recommend it. Among the crappy, cheesy writing, there are some really deep messages that I thought were portrayed very well in this book. If you read the whole book and one off these messages gets through to you, then that's all that matters.