An Abundance of Katherines : Novel Review

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Goodreads Summary: Katherine V thought boys were gross
Katherine X just wanted to be friends
Katherine XVIII dumped him in an e-mail
K-19 broke his heart
When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton's type happens to be 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.

I'm going to be blunt: I've hated nearly every John Green novel I've read this far (The Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska, and Paper Towns) and well this one is my favorite John Green novel, yet I still didn't like it.

I rated it a 3.5 of 5 stars purely because it held higher merit than the rest of the John Green novels (all of which I would rate between 1-2 stars) purely because I found the footnotes and diagrams interesting additions to the novel, An Abundance of Katherines. 

I found the idea of Colin only dating girls named Katherine to be very strange and while it is not cliche in novels for there to be more than one character with the same name, I always seem to find John Green's novels to be written in an obnoxious cliche way.

However, while the writing and random (yes, they were random) general plot branches were somewhat annoying, I did enjoy the intelligent banter and intellectual aspects Colin had throughout the novel and the footnotes were a wonderful edition to the overall story.

Not necessarily a good book, but by far John Green's best written novel.

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