Over the summer, while my peers and friends spent their three months traveling along the coast of infinite happiness and completing their addition of the ‘best summer ever’, my time was spent reading books and comparing movies. I read nearly six books this summer and only one stood out to me.

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green is a book centered around love and the art of being dumped. In the lead character’s case, Colin Singleton, a student prodigy with academic based talents out of this world, being dumped became a routine for him. He’s the dumpee of 19 girls named Katherine but the last one aka K-19, left a different impression on him.

In attempts to mend his heart, Colin and his best friend Hassan took the trip of a lifetime to Gutshot, Tennessee, where they learned that love is, in fact, unpredictable and that Colin’s calculations cannot always determine whether or not he would be dumped in a certain amount of time.

Colin faces challenges with his insecurities and catches glimpses on the importance of education and the undeniable need for maintaining real life situations without applying it to a scientific theory or research. He attempts to find his “Eureka”, the moment where he discovers something astonishing, but his discovery is finding out how his mindset has been wrong throughout his entire trip and in the relationships he had with all of his ‘Katherines’.

I recommend this book as a 4 out of 5 due to its correlation with today’s society and how everything needs to be explained. Rather than having faith and living life, we look for explanations for everything that is unexplained and once there is one, we build our entire life on it without opening up to other possibilities. But I also  had a small issue with its unrealistic and rare situations, such as a guy dating 19 girls named Katharine isn’t realistic.

The book led me into a visual of the aspect of love and being in love. I’ve read several John Green books but this one showed me that even though we would like to map out our realms and predict our future without accepting the fact that things never work, our destiny isn’t determined by a math equation or a simplified expression. It is rather controlled by our actions and how we handle genuine love. It depicted the idea of love from both counter parts, one is where there is a such thing as in love the other is when the idea of love is what they end up falling for. You can easily enjoy the idea of it, by wishing and forcing yourself, and behaving unruly once the relationship tarnishes, but you would never know what real love would feel like if you only want to experience it and not to emotionally dwell in it.