“They like their coffee like they like their ex-boyfriends: bitter.”

Take one self-absorbed anagram-fanatic child prodigy (Colin), his hirsute and pudgy best friend (Hassan), put those Chicago boys in the Deep South, and you have one of the funniest and most well-written books I’ve read in a long time: John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines.

Colin Singleton has a history of dating, and being dumped by Katherines -- nineteen of them.  “Dating, after all, only ends one way: poorly.”  After being dumped on graduation day by Katherine XIX, Colin’s world is rocked so badly Hassan takes him on an impromptu road trip.  They end up in Gutshot, Tennessee, and spend long, hot days interviewing locals for an oral history project.  Through his interactions with Lindsey and the town’s many storytellers, along with his dedication to proving his Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, Colin grows to understand that he is not limited by his past – only by his own perceptions of himself.  Hassan provides brilliant humor, and is both the perfect foil and the perfect friend for Colin.

Given Colin’s incredible talent and intelligence (he speaks eleven languages), it’s no surprise that this quirky coming-of-age story is loaded with academic trivia, footnotes, and a serious mathematical appendix.  But what I wasn’t expecting was the sensitivity and depth of all of the characters, major and minor, and the beautiful rendering of a community bound together by work, gratitude, and affection.  In the end, Colin concludes (and one sees the novelist’s fingerprint in this) “. . . maybe stories don’t just make us matter to each other – maybe they’re also the only way to the infinite mattering he’d been after for so long.”