The Fault in Our Stars has, hands down, been my favorite book of the year. I passed by An Abundance of Katherines at a Half Price Books and thought I’d see what else John Green had to offer. I should have read AAoK first, because it was a good book- but it wasn’t a great book.
Amazon.com: When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton’s type is girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact. On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight, Judge Judy–loving best friend riding shotgun—but no Katherines. Colin is on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relationship, avenge Dumpees everywhere, and finally win him the girl. Love, friendship, and a dead Austro-Hungarian archduke add up to surprising and heart-changing conclusions in this ingeniously layered comic novel about reinventing oneself.
The underlying problem, for me, was the Theorem. I eventually got over the fact that a guy who is supposed to be a child prodigy, who spends all his free time reading & studying, had time to date nineteen girls by the time he graduated high school; mostly because a lot of his “relationships” were days long and barely registered as relationships in my opinion. I really enjoyed spending time with Hassan, Lindsay and even Colin but the constant math equations, graphs and footnotes were tedious. There was probably enough of a story just focusing on his growing past his Katherine obsession and dealing with not being a genius (the next step after being a prodigy) without the Theorem.
Colin is actually pretty whiny and annoying… I would kill for a sequel starring Hassan.
We must have been reading this at the same time. I enjoyed the theorem and the footnotes, but I’m with you on the problems with Colin as the protagonist and the ridiculous amount of Katherines. Colin’s such a navel gazer that as the reader I *knew* I was missing things that Hassan would’ve told me. I like Looking for Alaska much better than AAoK, but neither was as good as TFiOS. I haven’t read Paper Towns yet, but that will probably be for next year’s cannonball.