Review: An Abundance of Katherines

Colin Singleton, child prodigy, has just been dumped for the nineteenth time by a girl named Katherine. And he’s not ok. So, accompanied by his best friend, Hassan, Colin embarks on a spontaneous road trip with no agenda other than to get over Katherine the nineteenth. And prove his mathematical formula for predicting the outcomes of romantic entanglements, thusly achieving his “Eureka!” moment, marking his place in history, and winning back Katherine the nineteenth. But t

he pair of recent high school grads don’t get far on their spontaneous road trip before they end up in Gutshot, Tennessee, lured by the promise of viewing the grave of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

In Gutshot, they meet Lindsey Wells, a tour guide for the small town. While she doesn’t immediately help Colin rebound, there’s something there. But Lindsey is dating another guy named Colin, strangely enough. Lindsey’s mother, Hollis, who runs the tampon string factory, hires Colin and Hassan for the summer to document the townspeople’s personal stories, and invites them to stay at her home. Hilarity ensues as Colin and Lindsey both work through better understanding the timeless question: what really matters? Colin does finally get his “Eureka!” moment, but it’s not quite as he expected. Possibly better.

An Abundance of Katherines was a 2006 Printz Honor Book.

Katherines, Green’s sophomore novel, stands out from his others in several ways. While staying true to his depiction of real teenagers with real teenage problems, there isn’t a dark or tragic event hanging over the story as in his other novels, merely the ordinary complications of teenage romantic lives. This is also the only novel of Green’s that uses third person narrative rather than the first-person voice of the protagonist. Green has commented that was deliberate, because a first-person narrative would be unlikely to work well given Colin’s unique personality traits. While Green doesn’t explicitly describe Colin as on the autism spectrum, he does admit in his FAQs that he had the social habits and tendencies in mind when writing the character. As he says, he’s “not a doctor.” Since Green does not personally identify as autistic, it could be he wanted to take care not to misguidedly label Colin.

Green’s writing in the book is excellent as always, and full of clever wordplay, literary easter eggs, and abundant shenanigans. But in this book, despite no supernatural elements, the tone reads zany to the point of fantastical-adjacent absurdism. Perhaps this serves to simultaneously entertain and highlight the absurdity of life in general, which then provides an apt backdrop for the central question of the story: what really matters?

“You matter as much as the things that matter to you.” —John Green, An Abundance of Katherines (2006)