An Abundance of Katherines

Literary fiction · Comedy

First published: 2006
Print length: 227 pagesDutton Books, 2006

Description

Colin Singleton has spent his childhood being called a prodigy, but graduation leaves him terrified that exceptional intelligence may never become meaningful achievement. His romantic history is equally repetitive: nineteen girlfriends named Katherine have all broken up with him. After Katherine XIX ends their relationship, Colin’s friend Hassan pulls him into a road trip that lands them in rural Gutshot, Tennessee. There the pair stay with Lindsey Lee Wells’s family and take jobs recording the town’s oral history. Colin also begins constructing a theorem meant to predict the course of any romance from the personalities involved. As new friendships complicate his model, the trip tests whether human attachment—and Colin’s own significance—can ever be reduced to an elegant equation.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Direct · Witty

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Humorous · Playful · Reflective · Wistful

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Relationships

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

AmbitionComing of ageFriendshipIdentityKnowledge and truthLove

About John Green

John Green writes young adult novels and personal essays in a conversational, quick-moving style that pairs jokes and intellectual curiosity with illness, grief, anxiety, and the difficulty of knowing another person. His narrators are often bright teenagers who turn uncertainty into a project: a search, a theorem, or a trail of clues. Those devices give the books momentum while exposing the limits of the explanations his characters want. In Paper Towns, Quentin follows Margo’s clues across suburbs and highways, only to confront how thoroughly he has mistaken an imagined version of her for knowledge. Turtles All the Way Down places a missing-person plot around Aza’s intrusive thoughts, letting repeated mental spirals interrupt romance, friendship, and the forward pull of mystery. The Fault in Our Stars likewise uses a journey to pursue answers from a reclusive novelist, but keeps its attention on Hazel and Augustus’s wary, witty exchanges and their lives with serious illness. In The Anthropocene Reviewed, Green carries the same curiosity into nonfiction, using five-star reviews of ordinary phenomena to join research, memory, vulnerability, and environmental change.