Comparison Of Ender's Game 'And Paper Towns'

Book Addition to the Ninth Grade Reading Curriculum

After spending the whole night with her childhood friend, Quentin “Q” Jacobsen, Margo Roth Spiegelman goes missing the next day. During the search, Q and his friends, Lacey, Radar, and Ben, learn more about Margo. This book is well-written, enjoyable to read, and shares common themes with other books. Paper Towns by John Green should be read by ninth graders because of common themes it shares with other books, like friendship, coming of age, and freedom.

The theme friendship is in Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, as well as Paper Towns by John Green. In Ender’s Game, the friendship theme is evident in parts where Ender is interacting with Bean, Petra,

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout is the one to “come of age”. This is shown here, “...she would see Arthur Radley escorting me down the sidewalk, as any gentleman would do”. She made it look like she was being escorted because she knew that if they were just walking together, it would embarrass Arthur. Coming of age is shown in Fahrenheit 451 in Montag. This can be seen when Mildred’s friends Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Phelps come over. He yells at them, “‘Go home and think of your first husband divorced and your second husband killed in a jet and your third husband blowing his brains out…’”. This is Montag coming of age because most people wouldn’t think anything of having multiple husbands or husbands getting killed. He realizes this because he’s taken time to think about what people are actually doing, and he notices how wrong it is. During the search for Margo in Florida, Q finds clues that he thinks are being left for him. This leads him to many places around Florida, until he eventually figures out that Margo isn’t in Florida anymore. Instead she is in a town called Agole in New York. Realizing he has under 24 hours when he sees this posted in “Omnictionary” (Basically Wikipedia), “fyi, whoever Edits this-the Population of agloe Will actually be One until may 29th at Noon” (Green 236) he recognizes that Margo left this comment on the page because of something she said earlier in the book, “‘The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence’” (Green 236). He recognizes that he has to leave the day of his high school graduation to make it in time. Lacey, Ben, and Radar all come along for the 21 hour road trip and made it in time. When Margo and Q are finally reunited, they talk about things that happened during their childhood. They bury a journal that Margo had been writing stories and planning childish adventures to try and accept their