Miles Halter is tired of his boring and lonely life at home in Florida, so he decides to go a boarding school in Alabama, hoping that a new beginning might give him a new impetus. At the boarding school he makes friends with a group of youngsters - including the beautiful and intelligent yet unhappy Alaska Young - who open a whole new world for him.
Looking for Alaska is a novel about adolescents in their final years at school who are discovering friendship, love and desire, and learning how trust, responsibility, grief and loss are an integral part of human experience.

The first-person narrator

The book ''Looking for Alaska'' is written in the first-person narrator. This involving that we know all about Miles feelings and thoughts, so we can better identify ourselves with him. Furthermore he involved us into the story and we know all about his history. This narrative perspective also create a special way of suspense, because we don't know the other characters thoughts and how they will react next time.
But there's also a negative effect the first-person narrator has. We just know what Miles thinks about the charcters, what he suspects why they react this way and not in another way. So it makes it difficult for the reader to decide what's the truth about the other charcters or what's just an interpreation of their behaviour Miles made.