looking for alaska, Green. Yes. I’m made suspicious when a character in a book is presented as a smart kid but doesn’t behave the way smart kids in my experience have behaved. Even if a person’s particular talent seems very limited in scope, part of being smart is to be curious about the things one runs across, so it strikes me as unrealistic when someone who is presented as knowing a specific thing about a vast array of people is simultaneously presented as being completely ignorant of geography. People come from places, and many people have references to those places in their names. A smart kid will have wondered “where is that?” The only conclusion I can reach, having finished the book after writing the rest of this paragraph, is that the character in question is not intended to be a smart kid. That and a couple other bits make me suspect that the author was not a smart kid, but it is at best perilous to infer much about the author from his work.
That nagging bit aside, the book did not make me wish I hadn’t read it. It’s very much a YA novel, with Consequences and Lessons, and Green does a reasonable job of it.