AN ABUNDANCE of KATHERINES (audiobook) by John Green

 



Colin Singleton is a child prodigy who has recently stopped being a child. He has graduated from high school, is preparing to go to a great college but he is unsettled by a couple of things.

Number one: being a child prodigy means that you are potentially an important adult. Colin is aware that it is now time for potential to turn into something - anything - meaningful.

Number two: Colin just got dumped - again. He has dated 19 different girls and all are named Katherine. Technically it is 18 different girls because Katherine 1 is also Katherine 19, but the point is pretty much the same.

So, Colin is wallowing in self-pity when his best friend, a slacker named Hassan, comes to him and suggests that they need to go on a road trip. They head south through Indiana and eventually end up in Gutshot, Tennessee where Colin meets a girl named Lindsey who has only dated a boy named Colin...

My Review:

Despite the 3 star review, I thought this book has several good quotes.
This is a fair to middling audiobook. For the first half of the audiobook, I would have rated it 2 stars out of 5. I kept on listening because I am a fan of John Green (both his books and him generally) and he and I have both adopted the same city as our hometown. 

As the book went on, I bumped it up to a weak 3 stars because it did get better. By the way, I am very aware of the irony of reviewing a John Green book on a 5 star scale considering how much that Green hates assigning stars to things in reviews (check out his excellent collection of essays The Anthropocene Reviewed for more info.)

Part of the problem with this book was the reader Jeff Woodman. He has a perfectly pleasant reading voice and is very clear but - whatever "it" is, he didn't have "it" in my opinion. By the way, this is the reason that Green hates the 5 star system - I am rating the reader based on something that I can't define. We all do this, though. You hear two different bands play the same song and one has "it" and one clearly doesn't. In this case, I may very well have liked the book a little better with a different reader.

My other complaint about this book is Colin's insistence on trying to create a mathematical formula to figure out who is going to dump who in a relationship. I get that only a kid would try to do such a thing, but there were so many tedious scenes describing the development of the formula and discussions of the formula that I got sick of hearing about it. At one point, I thought that Colin had accidentally shot the notebook with the formula with a shotgun and I was so happy to be done with it all. I think it was a convenient thing for Green to use to occupy Colin's time - a sponge to suck up his time while other things were going on. Character A does this, Character B does that and Colin goes into the other room and works on his formula for 3 hours. 

So, while not a bad book, certainly not a great book. So far, I've read 5 of his books. 3 have 5 stars and 2 have 3 stars. That's a pretty good track record.

Update  - in November of 2023 it was announced that the  group Moms for Liberty challenged 300+ books in Florida. This book is one of them. See the entire list of books that the Moms want banished here.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: AN ABUNDANCE of KATHERINES by John Green.

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