book review
Title: The Fault in our Stars
Author: John Green
# of Pages: 336
Summary (from amazon.com): At 16, Hazel Grace Lancaster, a three-year stage IV-cancer survivor, is clinically depressed. To help her deal with this, her doctor sends her to a weekly support group where she meets Augustus Waters, a fellow cancer survivor, and the two fall in love. Both kids are preternaturally intelligent, and Hazel is fascinated with a novel about cancer called An Imperial Affliction. Most particularly, she longs to know what happened to its characters after an ambiguous ending. To find out, the enterprising Augustus makes it possible for them to travel to Amsterdam, where Imperial’s author, an expatriate American, lives. What happens when they meet him must be left to readers to discover. Suffice it to say, it is significant. Writing about kids with cancer is an invitation to sentimentality and pathos-or worse, in unskilled hands, bathos. Happily, Green is able to transcend such pitfalls in his best and most ambitious novel to date. Beautifully conceived and executed, this story artfully examines the largest possible considerations-life, love, and death-with sensitivity, intelligence, honesty, and integrity. In the process, Green shows his readers what it is like to live with cancer, sometimes no more than a breath or a heartbeat away from death. But it is life that Green spiritedly celebrates here, even while acknowledging its pain. In its every aspect, this novel is a triumph.
Opinion: This book kept showing up on every 'Best Selling' list for YA fiction I'd come across at the end of 2012, so when I found an e-copy floating around I figured I'd give it a read and see what the big deal was about. I really enjoy John Green's writing style and his uncanny ability to write young people is incredibly - very raw, honest, and realistic. This book was no different - it was a very no-nonsense look at life and death through the eyes of probably the most realistic character I've come across in YA. Hazel pulls no punches, about herself, her cancer, or anyone else around her which made her ultimately relatable and endearing. The relationship between Hazel and Gus and their subsequent trials and tribulations were a bit predictable (I could have told you how it was going to end after the readers first meet Gus), but the direction of the story and the inclusion of their search to meet a particular author was interesting, exciting, and surprisingly. A good, quick read, I really appreciated this novel and hope to read more from Green in the future.
Now Reading: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
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