The Fault in Our Stars -- John Green

A note to those of you who assured me that The Fault in Our Stars wouldn't make me cry:

BLEEPITY-BLEEP BLEEPING BLEEP BLEEP. BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP. BLEEP.

I would like, very much, for one of you to come over here are make me some Serious Comfort Food right now. It's the least you could do.

As I suspect that everyone else* has already read this one, I'm not going to go into the whole synopsis thing. I'll give you ten words: girl with terminal cancer meets boy in her support group. Okay, I'll give you four more: they fall in love. Cancer is front-and-center—Hazel is, after all, terminal, and Augustus and Isaac are living with different varieties of it as well—but it's not a Cancer Book.

It's not full of platitudes—well, there are some platitudes, but they aren't ever directed at the reader—and it's not gentle. It's never gentle.

You know what got me about The Fault in Our Stars more than anything else? What made me, on more the one occasion, laugh out loud even while I was bawling**? It wasn't the witty banter or the poetry or the philosophizing or the mullings-over of mortality. It was Hazel's empathy.

Hazel—and through her, the reader, or at least, this reader—feels empathy for everyone. She doesn't eat meat because she wants to "minimize the number of deaths [she is] responsible for". She doesn't want to get close to Augustus Waters because she thinks of herself as a grenade and she'd like to "minimize casualties". She feels for the four Dutch Aron Franks who died in the Holocaust, "without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them". She feels for a girl who dumped her newly-blind boyfriend, a girl she doesn't even know, and boy who is Hazel's friend. She feels for a bitter old man who verbally abuses and disappoints her. Hell, in a way, she even feels for cancer: "Even cancer isn't a bad guy really: Cancer just wants to be alive".

I've seen, here and there, complaints about Augustus—that he's too understanding, too perfect—and, yes: maybe he is. But Hazel—not just her voice, because she was so real to me from the start that I felt physically connected to her—transcended any issues I had with Augustus as a character.

So, yeah. I'm going to go break into the Thin Mints now.

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*Except my sister.

**And holy cow, I was bawling. My face hurts from all of the crying I just did.

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Amazon | Indiebound. 

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Author page.

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Book source: personal copy.

Comments

[Robin]

Yeah, I lost my best friend to cancer 3+ years ago and everyone said, "No, read it, it will be good." Liars. I mean, it's a vey good book...

You can read what I thought here, if interested: gettingdressedoutofthedryer.tumblr.com/

[sassymonkey]

Oh. I totally would have told it was going to make you sob.

Hmm interesting that some people thought Augustus was "too perfect." I kind of thought that if you were not Hazel, Isaac, or anyone he liked that he had the potential to be a real ass.

[Jenn]

I don't know who you were talking to that told you TFIOS wouldn't make you cry, because I cried like a little girl.
As for Augustus being too perfect, well, I didn't think so the first time around, and I'm not quite brave enough to read it a second time to confirm that.

[Leila]

I don't know if I think that Augustus was "too perfect", but could easily see why some readers might see him that way. Since Hazel's the one telling the story, we get her "deep thoughts" as well as her anger and sass and everything else, and so we get to know her better -- except for a few scenes in the last third of the book, we almost always see Augustus as pulled together and in 'Philosopher Mode'.

Holy cow, though. I swear there were people who were all, "Oh, you'll be fine."

[Julie]

I love that Hazel read poetry, but didn't write it.