Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Eight: Mosquitoland

Mosquitoland is David Arnold's first novel--it was just published this spring--and it is also a YA novel.  Kind of in spite of its almost aggressive quirkiness--an increasingly common YA novel trait in the era of John Green's outrageous popularity--I found Mosquitoland to be a compelling read, and I found the end to be particularly satisfying in that, as in real life, not everything is perfect, nor is everything as I had expected it to be as I was reading, but there was still a good measure hope for the characters.  (In these ways, and in a few others,* in fact, Mosquitoland reminds me of John Green's novels, and I think fans of John Green would likely enjoy Mosquitoland.)  But I digress...

Mosquitoland, set in modern America, follows the journey of 16-year-old Mim, who has been moved from Ohio to Mississippi by her father and new step-mother, and who is determined to make it back to Ohio when she realizes that something is very wrong with her mother.  Along the way, Mim meets a whole host of whacky characters, some of whom become fast friends, and all of whom are a little unbelievable (but no less fun for that).  Mim tells her own story from the first-person--some of it is in the form of letters she's writing--and her voice is so original that it really drew me in, even if I sometimes found myself slightly annoyed by Mim.  And I wanted to know how her crazy adventure would turn out--there's plenty of suspense in this story, and I was kept guessing until the end (although once I reached the end, I felt I should have seen it coming).  Anyway, if you're into YA fiction generally, or if you like John Green's writing and want something similar, or you want a story about someone traveling on a Greyhound bus, definitely give Mosquitoland a try.

*Other similarities with John Green's novels include...
...the importance of traveling around the U.S. unfettered by adults (Paper Towns, An Abundance of Katherines).
...a spunky, highly individual, and extremely idiosyncratic protagonist, who is also a basically normal American teenage girl (The Fault in Our Stars, but also major "supporting" characters (i.e. the girl characters whose lives utterly shape the lives of the boy protagonists) in Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns).
...the use of first-person narration from a protagonist with a really distinctive voice (Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars--also Paper Towns, sort of, though its narrator is not so quirky).