An Abundance of Katherines

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Book Description: 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. He's also a washed-up child prodigy with ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a passion for anagrams, and an overweight, Judge Judy-obsessed best friend. Colin's on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which will predict the future of all relationships, transform him from a fading prodigy into a true genius, and finally win him the girl.
Letting expectations go and allowing love in are at the heart of Colin's hilarious quest to find his missing piece and avenge dumpees everywhere.

 It is well established that I am a huge fan of Vlogbrothers, John and Hank Green. It's even more established that I am a huge fan of Young Adult novels. The fact that John Green writes young adult novels kind of seems like a dream come true.

This is the first John Green novel I've read. According to a lot of the reviews I've since read, it's his worst book to date. I sure hope that's true, because I really liked it. I didn't love it or anything, but it was good. I read it quickly, even with all the math and footnotes.

Lets talk about the footnotes for a minute. I was reading on my kindle, and at the beginning found the footnotes really, really annoying. There was a lot of scrolling and clicking and back and forward. Bah. Didn't like it. At all. I would have skipped them all together, if it wasn't for two things - they were quite important to the story and they were really, really entertaining. By the end of the book I ended up loving the footnotes, even if reading them was mildly annoying.

Speaking of mildly annoying, both Colin and his best friend Hassan are kind of annoying. What with their watered down profanity and Hassan's too often mentioning of this "Thunderstick". Colin is particularly not very likeable - he's whiny and incredibly self absorbed. You kind of want to slap him in the face and tell him to get over himself. As un-likeable and annoying as they are, I still found myself caring about them and kind of liking them? I guess? I don't know, it's a little hard to explain.

...kind of like the reason I liked the book. I can give you tons of reasons why I shouldn't have liked it - the characters, the math, the fact that the story was incredibly predictable...But I still enjoyed it. Quite a lot.

On a scale from Totally Awesome to Horrifically awful, I would give this book a Really Good. I'd recommend reading it, but don't expect to be blown away.