An Abundance of Katherines

What's inside (8 sections)

1. The Boy Who Only Dated Katherines
2. Katherine XIX and the Road Out of Chicago
3. Gutshot, Tennessee and the Wells Family
4. Interviews, Hog Hunting, and Lindsey
5. The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability
6. Breakups, Blowups, and What Lasts
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked up An Abundance of Katherines because I wanted something light after a run of heavy novels, and a friend told me it was the funny John Green book. That description is true but shortchanges it. Published in 2006 by Dutton Books in a 227 page edition, it follows a boy who is smart in a very specific, almost painful way and who keeps dating girls with the same name. I laughed a lot in the first fifty pages. By the last fifty I was thinking about how hard it is to stop seeing yourself as a former something.

Colin Singleton was a child prodigy. As a kid he read fast and soaked up facts, and newspapers wrote about him. Then he grew into a teenager who was still smart but no longer astonishing, and that gap sits at the center of the book. He anagrams constantly. He will take a name like Katherine Carter and flip the letters into new phrases in the car or at dinner. It is a tic and a shield. When he feels bad he rearranges letters instead of saying what hurts.

The other thing about Colin is the Katherines. He has dated nineteen (19) girls named Katherine, in any common spelling, and he remembers each one with dates and who ended it. All but one dumped him. He can tell you about Katherine I and Katherine X and onward to Katherine XIX, who breaks up with him at the start and sets everything in motion.

His best friend Hassan Harbish is the reason the book moves. Hassan is funny, loves Judge Judy, hates school, and stays loyal even when Colin is exhausting. Hassan is Lebanese American and Muslim, mostly nonpracticing as shown here, and his jokes are crude and warm at once. The friendship feels real because Hassan calls Colin out. He likes Colin but he will not pretend Colin is fine when he is moping about a girl who already left.

The Boy Who Only Dated Katherines

Colin does not start out as someone you instantly root for. He mopes. He catalogs. He talks about himself as if his story is already over because he peaked at age eleven.

That is the point Green is working with. Colin believes being a prodigy was supposed to lead to being a genius, and now at seventeen he fears he will be ordinary. He clings to the Katherines because they give him a pattern. If nineteen girls with the same name all liked him for a while and then left, maybe there is a rule hidden in there. Maybe love can be graphed.

We meet him right after Katherine XIX ends it. Her name is Katherine Carter, a bright girl from his school in Chicago, and she dumps him gently but firmly. Colin hears only the dump part. He locks himself in his room, replays conversations, anagrams her name into sad phrases, and tells Hassan his life is finished.

Hassan refuses that script. He shows up, eats food from Colin's fridge, and pitches a road trip. No college visits, no plan, just drive. Colin's parents agree to fund it. They think air and miles will help. Colin agrees mostly because staying home means thinking about Katherine XIX in every corner of the house.

Before they leave, Green lays out the Katherine history in quick flashes. Some lasted weeks, some lasted months. Colin was always the eager one, the one who wrote notes and remembered anniversaries. He was dumped by eighteen of them. What sticks is his belief that he is always the Dumpee, never the Dumper, and that this says something fixed about him.

Katherine XIX and the Road Out of Chicago

The road section is where the book finds its comic rhythm. Hassan and Colin pile into a car with too many books, too many snacks, and a made up game about who can spot the most interesting roadside grave. Hassan drives with confidence he does not always earn. Colin navigates with maps and worries.

Hassan has one rule: they will follow curiosity. When they see a sign for the supposed burial place of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Tennessee, they chase it. It is fake in the way roadside oddities often are, but it gives them a destination and a joke to repeat. Hassan teases Colin about anagrams. Colin teases Hassan about refusing college or work. They stop for gas station food and sleep badly in cheap motels.

What I liked is how Green lets Colin stay sad without letting sadness stop the plot. Colin still thinks about Katherine XIX every hour. But the miles add up. The car smells like fries. Hassan sings badly. He is still the boy who got dumped, but he is also a boy in Tennessee looking at hills he has never seen before.

They reach Gutshot almost by accident. The car needs a break. They need food. They hear about a general store and a factory town with a strange name and decide to look. That choice, random and small, changes the summer.

Gutshot, Tennessee and the Wells Family

Gutshot is tiny, the kind of place where everyone knows whose truck is parked where. The center of town life is tied to the Wells family. Hollis Wells runs what is left of a factory that once made tampon strings. That detail sounds like a joke and Green does get jokes out of it, but he also treats it straight. The factory gave the town jobs for years. Now it is closing, and Hollis wants to preserve stories before people scatter.

Hollis meets Colin and Hassan at the store and sizes them up fast. She offers them a deal: stay for the summer in a house with a shower and a kitchen, earn good pay, and interview residents to build an oral history. She wants voices on tape, funny stories and sad ones, who worked where, who married whom.

Colin, who loves archives and patterns, lights up. Hassan, who loves money and air conditioning, lights up for different reasons. They say yes.

Then they meet Lindsey Lee Wells, Hollis's daughter. Lindsey is seventeen, sharp and funny. At first she reads as the cute small town girl who guides the new boys around. She knows every shortcut and creek. She wears work boots and old shirts, drives fast on back roads, and can talk to a ninety year old widow and a bored teenager with the same ease.

Lindsey also has a boyfriend named Colin, called TOC for The Other Colin. TOC is big, handsome, dull in conversation, and possessive. Lindsey stays with him for reasons she does not fully explain at first. She says he is safe. Colin Singleton watches this and tries not to care, then cares a lot.

The house Hollis gives them sits near woods and fields. Hassan claims the better bedroom and sets up a television schedule. Colin sets up notebooks. Within days they fall into a routine: interviews in the morning, hanging out with Lindsey in the afternoon, long talks at night.

Interviews, Hog Hunting, and Lindsey

The interview chapters are my favorite part. Colin and Hassan sit with old men who talk about hunting and first jobs, women who ran the factory line, couples who married young and stayed. Hassan, who expected to be bored, turns out to be good at getting people to talk. Colin asks follow up questions that show he listened.

Through these tapes Gutshot starts to feel lived in. Colin writes notes in the margins about who dumped whom. He cannot help it. He sees every story as data.

Lindsey becomes their guide and, slowly, their close friend. She takes them to her secret hideout in the woods where she goes to think. She shows them where to swim. Around TOC and her popular friends she acts bubblier and simpler. Around Colin and Hassan, alone on a porch or in the car, she is wry and honest about feeling stuck.

One long set piece involves feral hog hunting with local boys, including TOC. Hassan, brave about jokes and nervous about danger, ends up in a tree while a hog circles below. It is scary and funny at once. TOC looks strong but careless. Hassan looks scared but honest. Lindsey watches and sees the differences more clearly than she wants to admit.

There is also a quieter thread with Hassan and Katrina, a friend of Lindsey's. Hassan flirts, then pulls back. He jokes about never working or trying. Over the summer those jokes start to sound less funny to him.

Colin and Lindsey grow close in small steps. They trade favorite books. They argue about whether Lindsey should leave Gutshot for college or stay near her mother. She tells him she feels like two people: the Lindsey others see, and the Lindsey she is when no one needs anything. Colin tells her she contains more than one arrangement of letters. She laughs, but the line sticks.

I liked that Green does not rush them into romance. For a long stretch they are friends who might become more. Colin is still hung up on Katherines. Lindsey is still with TOC. The tension builds because they enjoy each other, not because the plot forces it.

The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability

While all this happens, Colin works on his big idea. He wants a formula that predicts the course of any romantic relationship. He calls it the Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability.

The basic shape is a graph. On one axis is how much someone likes the other at the start, or how outgoing each person is. On the other axis is time. The curve shows who is the Dumper and who is the Dumpee, and when the break will happen. If you plot his nineteen Katherines, he thinks, the curve will fit. Then he can plug in any couple and see the future.

Hassan helps by teasing the math and by supplying counterexamples. Lindsey helps by giving him real couples from Gutshot. Colin fills notebooks with axes and notes. He gets excited when a prediction works and explains away the misses.

This is where I have to be honest about a fair criticism, because the theorem is both the charm and the gimmick of the book. On the good side, it fits Colin perfectly. A boy who anagrams names would try to graph love. The graphs and footnotes give the novel a specific texture. There is even an appendix by mathematician Daniel Biss, who plays along and shows why a neat formula for dumping is harder than Colin hopes.

On the weak side, the theorem slows the story right when the human stuff gets good. Pages about curves can feel like homework inside a road novel. Some footnotes run long and break the rhythm. If you do not care about functions, you will skim. Green knew this risk. He has Hassan say the math is boring. He has Lindsey ask what it actually helps. He lets Colin get defensive in a way that shows the boy cares more about being right than being kind.

The middle third has a stretch where interviews blur and theorem talk takes over. Readers who came for Gutshot and Lindsey may wish Green had cut two graph talks and added two more porch conversations. The book is short, 227 pages, so the drag is not fatal, but you feel it.

What kept me reading was how the theorem reveals Colin. He wants to predict dumping to avoid feeling surprised again. If love follows a curve, then Katherine XX will not hurt the way Katherine XIX hurt. That wish is touching and a little selfish, and Green does not hide either side.

Breakups, Blowups, and What Lasts

The last part of the summer brings fights that force everyone to stop theorizing and act.

Lindsey finally sees TOC clearly during a night out. He drinks, shows off, belittles Colin Singleton, and expects Lindsey to laugh along. She does not. She has spent weeks watching Colin listen to old people and watching her mother work to save stories. TOC suddenly looks small next to that. They break up messily. Lindsey cries, then gets angry, then goes quiet.

Colin and Lindsey kiss not long after, and Green handles it without turning it into a prize scene. It is sweet and clumsy. Colin worries he is just the rebound. They agree they like each other but do not promise forever. For a book built on nineteen repeats of the same name, that restraint feels right.

Hassan has his own blowup, with his father on the phone and with Colin in person. He has been avoiding talk about college all summer. During a fight he admits he is scared of failing, so he pretends he does not care. Hassan decides he will try college after all, and the decision lands because it is hesitant rather than triumphant.

Colin finishes the theorem in a burst after these fights. He thinks it works. He can plug in Lindsey and TOC and show why she dumped him. He runs to tell Hassan and Lindsey, proud the way he was proud as a kid when adults clapped for his spelling.

Then the theorem fails on the case that matters most. Lindsey points out that his own story does not fit the clean curve once you include how he changed. What Colin does next matters more. He does not burn the notebooks. He laughs. He sees that people are not points. A girl named Katherine is not the same as the last one just because the letters match.

That lands as the real point. Colin spent the book trying to matter by being special. What he learns in Gutshot is plainer. He matters because he listens, because he stays for the long interview, because he shows up for Hassan when Hassan is scared. Lindsey tells him something like that near the end, and for once Colin does not anagram his way out of feeling it.

The ending does not tie everything with a bow. Colin and Lindsey are together but facing distance when summer ends. Hollis gets her tapes, though whether the archive will save Gutshot is left open. Colin does not become a genius on the last page. He becomes a person who can leave a town he loves without needing a formula to explain why it hurts.

If you want a fast romance with a neat twist, this is not that book. If you want a funny summer novel about a bright boy learning that graphs cannot protect him, and a girl learning she can be more than the role her town gave her, Gutshot is a good place to spend a week.

FAQ

Who are Colin and Hassan in An Abundance of Katherines?

Colin Singleton is a former child prodigy fixated on anagrams and on girls named Katherine. Hassan Harbish is his funny best friend who pushes him to leave Chicago after the nineteenth breakup.

What is the Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability?

It is Colin's graph that tries to plot Dumpers against Dumpees to forecast how any relationship will end. In Gutshot he tests it on Lindsey, Hassan, and town couples with mixed results.

Is An Abundance of Katherines only for teens?

No. It was published in 2006 by Dutton Books as young adult fiction, but its jokes about language, math, and friendship appeal to older readers too.