Nineteen Katherines and One Broken Heart Math

A Washed-Up Prodigy, Nineteen Katherines, and One Road Trip

Colin Singleton has just been dumped. Again. By a Katherine. Again. That’s not a typo or a coincidence, it’s the whole premise: Colin has dated nineteen girls in his life and every single one of them has been named Katherine, and Katherine XIX (roman numerals, because of course) just broke up with him days after his high school graduation. Colin is a former child prodigy, the kind of kid who could read at eighteen months and anagram anything you said back to you in real time, but he’s terrified he’s not actually a genius, just a kid who was good at trivia and is now aging out of being special. So his best friend Hassan, who has spent a gap year (or several) on the couch watching Judge Judy and refusing to go to college, decides they need a road trip. They end up in Gutshot, Tennessee, working a summer job interviewing the town’s dying textile industry for a woman named Hollis Wells, and falling into orbit around Hollis’s daughter Lindsey, who is definitely, notably, not named Katherine.

What Colin actually does with his time in Gutshot is try to build a mathematical formula, the Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, that will graph every relationship he’s ever had and predict, for any two people, who dumps who and when. It’s the nerdiest possible response to heartbreak I’ve ever seen a protagonist attempt, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

The Footnotes Are Doing More Work Than the Plot

Here’s the thing about this book: it is not as emotionally devastating as “Looking for Alaska,” and if you go in expecting that kind of gut-shot ending you will be disappointed. I was, a little, on my first read. There’s no tragedy lurking around the corner here. Nobody dies. The stakes are almost entirely internal, which is either the bravest choice Green made in his early career or the reason this book gets less love than the others, and honestly it’s probably both.

What it has instead is Green’s nerdiest, funniest voice. The footnotes (yes, footnotes, in a YA novel) explain everything from Arabic grammar to the actual math behind Colin’s theorem, and instead of feeling like homework they feel like being trapped in a car with the smartest, most annoying friend you have, the one who cannot let a tangent go. Hassan is the reason to read this book. He is funnier than Colin, sharper than Colin, and gets some of the best lines about being a fat, lazy, deeply Muslim American teenager who has made peace with disappointing everyone’s expectations except his own. There’s a running bit where he refuses to define himself by anyone else’s timeline for adulthood, and it lands harder than most of what Colin says about being a genius.

My real criticism: Lindsey Lee Wells, the love interest, never fully escapes being a device. She exists largely to teach Colin that not every girl is a Katherine and not every story fits a graph, which is a fine lesson, but it means she’s underwritten compared to Hassan. And the actual math, real math, developed with a mathematician’s help and printed in an appendix, is a gimmick that either delights you or makes your eyes glaze. I loved it. My sister, who I made read this right after me, called it “insufferable” and I still haven’t forgiven her for that word choice, though I get it.

Let me be honest about something else too: I think I love this book slightly more than it deserves, and I know that. It’s not as tight as “Alaska,” the pacing sags in the Gutshot middle section, and Colin’s arc resolves a little too neatly for a book about how life refuses to be graphed. But I read it during a summer where I was, weirdly, obsessed with the idea that heartbreak could be predictable if you just had enough data, so it hit at exactly the right angle for me. Your mileage may genuinely vary here.

If you want your own copy to argue with me about, it’s here on Amazon.

The whole book is really an argument that you can’t graph a person, and it’s more convincing for how hard Colin tries anyway.

About John Green

John Green is the guy who made vlogging with his brother Hank a career move before that was a career, co-founding the Vlogbrothers and the whole Nerdfighteria community out of a shared inability to stop talking to a camera about tapeworms, geography, and the meaning of suffering. Before any of that he worked as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital, which explains exactly why his books keep circling illness, mortality, and kids who are smarter than the adults around them. He wrote “Looking for Alaska” first, in 2005, then this one, then eventually “The Fault in Our Stars” turned him into the kind of author whose fans cry in public about a fictional oxygen tank. He’s also spent years talking, loudly and specifically, about tuberculosis treatment access and the maternal mortality crisis, which tells you the sentimentality in his books isn’t an act.

If This Made You Want More Nerdy Heartbreak, Read These Next

• “Looking for Alaska” by John Green, for the version of this book that actually breaks your heart instead of just bruising it
• “The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks” by E. Lockhart, for another prickly genius protagonist who refuses to be underestimated
• “Eleanor and Park” by Rainbow Rowell, if you want the messier, more romantic cousin of this story
• “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green, for when you’re ready to actually cry

For your book club

1. Does Colin’s Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability actually work by the end, or does the book prove that it can’t?
2. Is Hassan a fully realized character or mostly a delivery system for jokes and wisdom, and does it matter which?
3. Why do you think Green chose to make the stakes so internal here compared to his other books?
4. What does the town of Gutshot, and its dying textile mill, add thematically beyond just a setting?
5. Did Lindsey Lee Wells feel like a real person to you, or a lesson Colin needed to learn?