The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
My eyes are still puffy and scratchy from the tears — I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler that there is death in a book about teens who meet at a cancer support group — and I don’t think I’ve shed so many tears over the written page since Dumbledore was so rudely done in.
Hazel and Gus are teens, living with cancer and all of the pity and “Cancer Perks” that come with it but they are also trying to just grasp at whatever pieces of normalcy that are still available. John Green has managed to capture something awful and unspoken (or only spoken of in hushed rooms) and given it a voice — not of hope but of reality — it’s the “F**K cancer” t-shirt of characters-with-a-terminal-illness novels. The plot turns in ways I’d never have anticipated but never jarringly so. The language ranges from “seriously, no one speaks that way (but it’s damned clever)” (think Gilmore Girls or the West Wing) to perfectly captured dialogue as though it had been transcribed from an overheard conversation. The people in this book are smart but no one ever calls anyone a nerd. I could go on.
It makes me both want to read everything else Green has put on paper and also nothing else, for fear he couldn’t equal it.
I grant that may be a bit overstated, but it’s a rare book to make me drop almost everything else and just read. And yet, while I’d had this book sitting on my “want to read” list for a while, it wasn’t until my daughter brought it home and completely bonded with it that I decided I needed to read it too.
Midway through her reading, she proclaimed, “I never want to stop reading this book,” and after she was done, wished that there was a way to erase a book from memory, “so you could fall in love with it for the first time all over again.”
I don’t think I can offer a better review.