John Green‘s second novel An Abundance of Katherines again relies on the trope of feisty female as the emotional saviour of a socially awkward young male, yet manages to be an inviting, and very funny, look at teenage relationships and friendships. After being dumped by his nineteenth girlfriend named Katherine, child prodigy Colin Singleton sets of on a cross-country road trip with his best friend Hassan in order to clear his mind and work on a mathematic formula which predicts the rate of relationship failure. Colin does come up with his desired formula, but more importantly, learns along the way, with a little help from a smart and sassy young woman named Lindsey, that the unpredictably best parts of life cannot be measured. Despite An Abundance of Katherines following a very similar track as Green’s previous novel, there is enough quirky characters and genuine humour and warmth to distinguish it in its own right.

“May I be excused for a moment?” he asked.
“Is it important?”
“I think I have an eyelash in my pupillary sphincter,” replied Colin and the class erupted into laughter. Ms. Sorenstein sent him on his way, and then Colin went into the bathroom and, staring at the mirror, plucked the eyelash from his eye, where the pupillary sphincter is located.
After class, Hassan found Colin eating a peanut butter and no jelly sandwich on the wide stone staircase at the school’s back entrance.
“Look,” Hassan said. “This is my ninth day at a school in my entire life, and yet somehow I have already grasped what you can and cannot say. And you cannot say anything about your own sphincter.”
“It’s part of your eye,” Colin said defensively. “I was being clever.”
“Listen, dude. You gotta know your audience. That bit would kill at an ophthalmologist convention, but in calculus class, everybody’s just wondering how the hell you got an eyelash there.”
And so they were friends.

Socially awkward and intellectually gifted, Colin Singleton is broken up over his most recent break-up with Katherine #19. (I’ve tried not to over think how such a socially inept young man has managed to charm nineteen Katherines, when he is completely and utterly devoid of social skills.) His best friend, the hilarious Hassan, takes him on a cross-country road trip to heal his wounds, landing finally in Gutshot, Tennessee via a visit to the grave of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. There they meet Lindsey Lee Wells and decide to stop in Gutshot working for her mother. Bonding with Lindsey and her friends, and working on his formula to predict the outcomes of his Katherine relationships, Colin learns a little about himself, and a lot about life.

The reading quieted his brain a little. Without Katherine and without the Theorem and without his hopes of mattering, he had very little. But he always had books. Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.

My main issue with Looking for Alaska [review] was the use of Alaska as a narrative device rather than a fully fleshed out character; her motivations are hidden, but only to be uncovered by our sleuthing protagonist. In An Abundance of Katherines, the female romantic lead, Lindsey, forms a more genuine connection with Colin without the manic mood swings or mysterious air, before exploring their relationship further. Though Colin does come to see the unpredictability of life as a grand pleasure through Lindsey’s influence, it seems to shift based on more a shared experience – they both overcome heartache and find each other, and happiness, despite of it.

An Abundance of Katherines is full of random trivial tidbits and a number of seemingly insignificant subplots, all of which somehow manage to strengthen a reader’s perception of the story and the characters. The friendship between Hassan and Colin is very funny, a pair of more unlikely friends you could not imagine, but their sincere affection and friendly vernacular are so endearing. Even if his use of female characters is a little problematic, John Green knows how to write about close friendships and An Abundance of Katherines is a clever and amusing look at the complexity of friendships, relationships and our own understanding of life.