Review: The Fault in Our Stars

The Fault in Our Stars

Author: John Green
Pages: 313
Publisher: Dutton Books
Source: BEA

Description from Goodreads:
Diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer at 13, Hazel was prepared to die until, at 14, a medical miracle shrunk the tumours in her lungs... for now.

Two years post-miracle, sixteen-year-old Hazel is post-everything else, too; post-high school, post-friends and post-normalcy. And even though she could live for a long time (whatever that means), Hazel lives tethered to an oxygen tank, the tumours tenuously kept at bay with a constant chemical assault.

Enter Augustus Waters. A match made at cancer kid support group, Augustus is gorgeous, in remission, and shockingly to her, interested in Hazel. Being with Augustus is both an unexpected destination and a long-needed journey, pushing Hazel to re-examine how sickness and health, life and death, will define her and the legacy that everyone leaves behind.

First Sentence: "Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death."

Review:
In a strange way, I always sort of dread reading anything by John Green. Weird, right? See, I live in perpetual fear that one day he will let me down and his book will be less brilliant than I'm expecting. My expectations when it comes to John Green are ridiculously high, because, basically, he's like the god of the nerds and, even in the books I like less, his writing makes me laugh and makes me feel. Despite this constant fear, his books have, so far, improved every time, with The Fault in Our Stars being his best yet, dark and funny and honest and touching and hopeful and depressing and painful and perfect.

*wipes away tears*

When people talk about this book, the first thing they mention is the sadness of it, of how many tissues are requisite to getting through this novel without emerging a snot monster at the end. What struck me much more strongly, though, was the sense of humor and optimism running through the book, even the darkest moments. The humor doesn't subtract from the pain or the suffering; it humanizes it, and enhances the strength of the characters.

In the past, my main complaint about John Green's books (no, I did not think they were all completely perfect) were the characters. They were real, but they were annoying and repetitive (especially with Paper Towns and Looking for Alaska. None of them did I fall completely in love with, although Tiny Cooper was close. In Hazel and Augusta, John Green's characterization has seriously hit its stride in my opinion.

Hazel's voice is just...incredible. Her sarcasm, her brutal honesty, her anger, her intelligence and her wit all made her one of the most wonderful narrators I've ever encountered. I love the way she phrases things. I love that she uses some words that I don't know the meaning of, which really doesn't happen often in my reading. Hazel feels wholly like a kindred spirit, like we would be friends if we ever met, which would totally never happen since we're both so anti-social. Also, she feels one hundred percent like a female to me, always a remarkable thing for a male author to accomplish.

Hazel and Augustus meet and there's an immediate attraction. Though they immediately feel for one another on some level, John Green deftly doesn't go anywhere near instalove territory. For one thing, there's Hazel's cancer, which holds the two apart. Even if there weren't and they immediately leaped into a relationship, I would have been okay with it, because the two legitimately develop a bond. They wisecrack and have this insane rapport; they share a love of word play and navel gazing. They trade their favorite novels and both go into the experience with an open mind, even though the novels were not what they were expecting. They are, without a doubt, one of the best, most convincing, most well-matched couples I have encountered in fiction.

Throughout The Fault in Our Stars, John Green has woven a lot of thoughts about the value of fiction and about what a novel really is, both to the reader and to the author. Hazel's favorite novel, An Imperial Affliction by Peter Van Houten, is a work of literary fiction about a young girl with cancer; Augustus' is a series of novelizations based on a video game about the adventures of Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem. While there's clearly a difference of literary merit between the two, I loved how John Green stressed the importance of both.

I feel like there isn't much more that I can say about this without cutting into your enjoyment of the book. I realize I didn't talk about the cancer at all, but I suppose that was intentional, because the book isn't so much about the cancer as about the people who are partially made of cancer. The cancer is them after all, not a foreign element. The book is wholly about cancer and wholly not, though I know that probably doesn't make any sense. What I mean is that this is in no way simply some weepy tearjerker stereotype of a cancer book.

My words are failing me, so I leave you now with this: The Fault in Our Stars is everything I dreamed it would be and more. John Green constantly increases his awesomeness. With this novel, he will break your heart, repair said heart a few sizes larger, make you laugh, give you hope, rip your heart to pieces again, and basically tell you the utter truth about a lot of awful things also known as life.

Rating: 5/5

Favorite Quote:

"‘I’m like. Like. I’m like a grenade, Mom. I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?’
    My dad tilted his head a little to the side, like a scolded puppy.
    ‘I’m a grenade,’ I said again. ‘I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there’s nothing I can do about hurting you; you’re too invested, so just please let me do that, okay? I’m not depressed. I don’t need to get out more. And I can’t be a regular teenager, because I’m a grenade.’"