Book Review
3 stars
*******
Unfortunate overuse of the words "sitzpinkler"/"Jew-fro." 
*******
There is a fine line between crafting readable fiction, and creating a storyline that is so supremely improbable that it defeats the purpose of trying to use it as a vehicle to explain something--and this book is tending very much toward the latter direction. (Another book that I just recently reviewed, "The Autobiography of an ex-Colored Man," was one such book that was trying to tell us something but....) 

1. First things first: if you want to read a road trip+bildungsroman book, I would sooner recommend Gary Paulsen's "The Car." 

2. Second is that this is the third of John Green's books that I have read (the other two were "Looking for Alaska" and "The Fault in Our Stars") and "Looking for Alaska" also won a Michael Prinz award. 

Incidentally, that book was just as ... strange as this one. 

"The Fault in Our Stars" was a good and memorable book, and yet: it won no such award. 

And so, that is telling me that "Michael Prinz Award" is shorthand for "unrealistic adolescent fiction that has unsavory / unlikely/unrelatable characters." (Kind of the same way that Oprah's Book club books are predictably trash.) 

******* 

-This could have been a story about overparented children, but it just didn't seem to develop into that. 

-It could have been story about children with social development issues. (And in that case, the fact that the protagonist was a genius was merely incidental. Contrary to popular belief: most children of high intelligence are well adjusted.  Also: because there are so many fiction books that have been written about people with social development problems, the gimmick of a boy genius is not enough to save the cliche.) 

-It could have been a Milan Kundera book for children. (There are a lot of elements of existentialism-lite. Ess muss sein/ Ess konte auch andersein.) 

Practically,  the book has a sort of "revenge" feel: 

-A morbidly obese Arab with man breasts makes out with the hottest girl in a town. (Revenge of the fat boys.) 

-A scrawny nerd with the Jew-fro gets the girl over a muscle bound football player. (Revenge of the nerds.) 

-This guy who is super smart.....well he has social/emotional difficulty so he's not "really" happy. (Revenge of the idiots.) 

-The girl who gets mistreated by her rakish but handsome boyfriend gets some self-respect and leaves. (Revenge of the spurned girlfriends. And I don't think anybody who lives in the Real World / might have seen "The Last American Virgin" really thinks that abusive men are ever without women. Or, that there is a certain fraction of women that cannot get enough of abusive men. If this book had been accurate, the Spurned Girlfriend would probably have doubled down on the Bad Guy Boyfriend and would have spent so much additional time fellating him that his skull would have caved in by the end of the book.) 

At the end of the day, I'll just have to dismiss this as yet another among a million forgettable bildungsroman that has been written--but with a lot of neat factoids and a couple of good quotes: 

1. (p.207): "And the moral of the story is that you don't remember what happened. What you remember *becomes* what happened." 

2. (p.212): "You can make a theorem that explains why you won or lost past poker hands, but you can never make one to predict future poker hands. The past, like Lindsay had told him, is a logical story. But since it is not yet remembered, the future need not make any sense at all." 

Verdict: Not recommended for my kids. No morals-of-story to be taken away.