“An Abundance of Katherines” by John Green
What better way to follow up a Toni Morrison bender than with a young-adult romance? An Abundance of Katherines was a good sorbet after a lot of tough reading.
The morning after noted child prodigy Colin Singleton graduated from high school and got dumped for the nineteenth time by a girl named Katherine, he too a bath.
Colin worries that he’ll never cross that liminal space between prodigy and genius. Devastated by the latest dumping, he and his friend Hassan (who is an unfortunate trope: the fat, funny one) leave the Chicago area for a road trip to the boonies of Tennessee. There they meet a girl named Lindsay, her odd mother Hollis, and end up with oddly high-paying jobs as documentarians.
Colin is an engaging, if sometimes whiny narrator. I liked his asides and DFW-esque footnotes. The book zips along to an enjoyable, if not all that surprising, conclusion. Fun, but not life changing.