John Green floored me with "Looking for Alaska". It has been years since I read a book like that -- a book where I wanted to be in that universe, where I felt like I was the main character, where I went through the same emotions. An Abundance of Katherines is... not so flooring. It's missing something. I think the characters and plot seem too implausible -- wacky, but not realistically wacky.

The main character is a snobby child prodigy who can anagram anything. Despite his feelings of alienation and being all up in his head (because he's gotten dumped for the nineteenth time), he still constantly shows off. The thematic thread through the story is that he's working on a math equation to predict who will be dumped in a relationship -- an objective formula based on subjective variables(?). Also he keeps dating only girls named Katherine (not Catherine or Kathryn). I've never even met nineteen girls with the same name.

His best friend is a fat, quick-witted Muslim named Hassan who seems to have a thing for Judge Judy. Ladies and gentleman, this character doesn't exist. It gets even more implausible when Hassan convinces the mopey main character to take a road trip. They're both eighteen, freshly graduated, and decide to go down to bumpkin-ville, where they then take up residence in some stranger's house who offered them a busywork job on the spot going to other strangers' houses and collecting oral histories. Maybe it's my conservative, safety-conscious Midwestern upbringing, but RED FLAG! RED FLAG!

It seems like John Green decided to turn 180 with his writing style on this one. No more melodramatic high school. Now it's fast times, introspection, and loads of obnoxious footnotes. This one seems highly skippable.