Kaitlyn Chow
November 6, 2014
ELA 812

Book Response

Looking For Alaska by John Green

          Smoking and cursing are things people frown upon, however, the book Looking For Alaska contains these things. Looking For Alaska by John Green is about Miles, who goes to high school and adopts bad habits such as smoking, cursing and breaking multiple rules. This book should be banned because although it does show a lot about the value of friendship, it contains many examples of rule breaking, bad influences and inappropriate issues.

          Drinking becomes a main habit in the book, and they do it for fun and act like it’s cool to do it, and that it’s no big deal. This an incredibly bad influence on the readers of the book because they are getting drunk by underage drinking and that is a horrible example to set. They play drinking games and sometimes turn to alcohol to reduce stress, like when Alaska died. An example of this is when Miles goes to Takumi for alcohol after Alaska dies. He says, “Do you have any alcohol?” and Takumi asks why. In response, Colonel says, “Uh, because we want to get drunk?” as if it were so obvious. This quote shows how easily the Colonel and Miles are around alcohol, and they don’t take drinking as a serious thing. 

           In the book, there are also many times when they smoke. Most of the time, Alaska is the one to influence them to smoke. She sometimes supplies them with cigarettes. “So, Alaska. Sell us some cigarettes,” the Colonel says on page 15. They depend on Alaska a lot, and she’s mainly the one who’s influenced them to this sad life of drinking, smoking, breaking curfew, cursing and setting pranks. This was also an example of them breaking rules because it was against the rules to smoke on campus, yet they still did it.

          Miles has changed throughout the book, and he’s definitely not the same person as he was when he first started going to Culver Creek high school. Before he attended this school, he never experienced the feeling of drinking alcohol or smoking. It’s described so the reader can infer that his parents were considered overprotective of Miles, and this is part of the reason why he felt like he was bad when first doing these things. As Miles says in the book, “I swallowed hard, and there, yes I did it. I was drinking on campus.” From this quote I can tell that Miles felt accomplished in this action because he’s never done something as rebellious as that. He felt like he was now cool and was even a bit shocked, proud even. Most of them reason why Miles did all these things was because Miles was peer pressured into it. The environment that John Green created for Miles affected him in a bad way, and he is now a bad influence.

          Banning this book would be the right thing to do because of the inappropriate issues. Looking For Alaska can relate to readers because by reading this text, they might think that these things are okay to do in their lives. However, the actions in this book should not be copied because underaged drinking and drunk driving is illegal. In addition, drunk driving puts others in danger as well. Also, smoking is brought up a lot in the book, and I feel like you shouldn’t smoke because it’s one of the worlds top killers. Looking For Alaska does not set good examples and should be banned for it’s inappropriate content.