The Fault In Our Stars

Heartbreaking but eye opening story =)

"You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are." ~ Augustus Waters

My favourite thing about this novel is the way 17-year old cancer survivor Augustus Waters loves the narrator, 16-year old terminally ill Hazel Grace Lancaster. Believe me, it was hard for me to come up with a favourite aspect of this novel. There were so many admirable qualities to THE FAULT IN OUR STARS. Once John Green gets the reader into the Literal Heart of Jesus, there's no turning back. He's got you for the duration.

This is such an exceptionally intelligent story, too. Hazel is dying. She has stage IV cancer. It is in a cancer support group where she meets the handsome and illustrious Augustus Waters. Gus is one of those wonderful characters I just can't get enough of...he's got a brain, a sense of humour and a unique outlook on the world. As the reader, I waited for him to appear in a scene. I know he's going to say something brilliant and I'm going to want to quote it later. He loves life, though he knows its ugliest secrets. He is able to see beauty even when his life has been less than beautiful. But most of all, his total and all-consuming love for Hazel...Green just does this RIGHT. Augustus's adoration of Hazel is exquisite.

At one point in their early acquaintance, Hazel asks Gus, "Why are you looking at me like that?" Any normal 17-year old boy would shy away, or say something really stupid and non-committal. They would blush to a red resembling fire. But our Augustus Waters, our philosopher in the making, says, "Because you're beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence."

The story is, on the surface, a story of cancer...how it fights to survive while it kills its host. But a cancer story shows nothing of humanity. Cancer in and of itself does not a story make. It's actually quite a blase thing in the grand scheme of things. Under the surface, this is a love story and a human story. And a clever story.

Hazel has a favourite book. Don't we all. I don't know about you, but when I see a book referenced within a book I love...I kind of get excited. I think, 'I wonder why the author chose this book to reference...I must read it!' I search it out to read it. Well, in the case of Hazel's favourite book...it does not exist outside the parameters of The Fault in Our Stars. AN IMPERIAL AFFLICTION was written by the character Peter Van Houten. The thing about AIA, though, is that it ends mid-sentence. Hazel would do anything to find out what happens to the characters in the book AFTER the book ends. But after sending many letters to Mr. Van Houten, and getting no reply, she has to keep wondering.

The almost perfect Augustus Waters (he is minus a leg, after all, thanks to osteosarcoma...but he is otherwise "on a roller coaster that only goes up") reads Hazel's fav. book. He then emails the author and receives a reply through the author's assistant. So begins the journey. The cancer-free Augustus uses his saved-up Cancer Perk wish to take Hazel to the reclusive Van Houten. He will stop at nothing to give the object of his affection whatever it is she wants.


Every character in this book is exquisitely written. The hardest characters to write in YA, in my humble opinion, are the parents. They are either ghosts or in the way. In THE FAULT IN OUR STARS, Green captures a perfect harmony with the two main characters and their parents. From Hazel's tearful father and hovering mother...to Augustus's parents and their houseful of ENCOURAGEMENTS. He just does it right.


I won't go into any more of the story, because I would only be giving it away. Just know that Hazel and Augustus fall in love--Hazel has terminal cancer--they share a love for a book that takes them on a journey--and they talk about life and death in beautiful ways.


Memorable Quotes:


'I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it.' - Hazel was a bit of a philosopher herself. Just a girl who wanted to live a little longer.


'...we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone.' - I never thought of this third space until Green spoke of it...and I knew exactly what he meant.


'I never saw the swing set again.' - Green has a great way of transferring the nostalgic feelings of the characters onto the reader.

"Grief does not change you Hazel. It reveals you." - Green also has a way of rescuing his less than likeable characters by having them say beautiful things at the right times.

'He fumbled toward Gus's hand and found only his thigh. "I'm taken," Gus said.' - I loved the comedic bits in this novel. This passage was between Gus and his friend Isaac, who lost both eyes to cancer.

Don't miss this one. It's a must read. I'm sure it'll make it to many re-read lists. It's definitely on mine.

Absolutely in love. I cried throughout most of this book. Cancer is something that hits home, and I feel that this was a book I needed to read!
John Green never fails to break my heart, in the most beautiful way possible.
And Augustus is definitely on my top ten list of heartbreaking-ly perfect characters.

My roommate Kaetlyn sat in awkward dismay on the futon as I sobbed on the old, blue love seat across the room. She had her computer on her lap and she tried to distract herself by scanning Facebook and Twitter. The decaf coffee I had made to trick my mind into staying awake had turned cold, and I stared at the bare-black cover of The Fault in Our Stars.

Felto walked in the room to me sobbing and asked, “Is there something wrong?”

“I finished the book,” I gasped between blowing my nose and wiping my eyes with another tissue. A pile laid there on the floor. I had been crying for at least forty pages.

“I see that.”

“It was sad.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, laughing. ”That’s not funny at all.”

Believe it or not, it is actually a rare occurance for me to cry over a book. I can only remember a few times I’ve felt so much at an end. Therefore, it is easy to conclude that John Green has accomplished something rare. He has made us fall in love with characters so much that we cannot let them go after they speak their last words. He has created a story that breaks hearts; that makes us accept reality as it is and hate how depraved and wicked the world is.

The main character, Hazel Grace, is an atheist sixteen-year-old girl living with cancer, who falls in love with an agnostic seventeen-year-old boy, Augustus. Augustus is a cancer survivor, and Hazel is expecting death in a few years, maybe. She does not know how much time she has left.

Christians might be (I hope they aren’t) turned off by the atheist and agnostic comments in the book, but there is a truth in them. Hazel prays even though she doesn’t believe in God, or god. She prays because it seems proper to pray; she struggles with knowing why the universe exists as it does. I feel like that’s a common state of adolescence: you’re in this unknown place and you’re not sure why it exists, and you’re beginning to realize that you’ll never really know because they are not in your textbook.

(Us Christians may say that they haven’t found the right textbook yet, but for most people, The Bible is a book. I don’t know if they ever categorize it as fiction; I do know that they don’t actually see the truth of the words within it.)

And, Hazel has reasons to be atheist. She has a terminal disease, and has no answer as to why she was the one to develop mutant cells. She has met plenty of other teenagers with cancer, and she has seen how their names just get tacked on to an end of a list when they die. They’re the grocery list of prayer. She has no reason to believe that she’ll be nothing but a name on a list, and a grenade to anyone she has touched emotionally.

So she falls in love—a passionate, unconditional love. Augustus loves her in the same way. They enter a relationship they know cannot last; they see the danger from the beginning. Unlike most teenage relationships, there are no rosy sunglasses beneath their eyes. And it breaks your heart because their love doesn’t end in the book, and you want to fight the universe so that they could live and be together and get in fights and break up like normal teenagers. But nothing is normal for them.

It makes you think about your own life and your own relationships and you realize how fragile it all is. How lucky you are that you know you have a chance to grow old with someone. You realize that you’re lucky you have a God that is good to you and who does nothing in vain. But then you realize that you can’t comfort yourself in this tragedy. Hazel and Augustus would not find a pleasant afterlife.

I know, I know. They’re characters. That comforts me a lot.I don’t actually have to worry about what happens to them after the novel ends. I still struggled a lot with all of this as I read the TFiOS, but I as I sat, looking at the black cover (I had taken the sleeve off to keep it nice), I realized that I ached to start reading it again as soon as I finished it.

But I wouldn’t change a single part of the story. That happens to me. I guess there is a first for everything. It may beat out Northanger Abbey as my favorite.

Well done, John Green, well done.

my review:
This book was perfect!!! Everyone should read it! The title, which is based on a Shakespeare-quote, was perfect for this book, and I cannot think of any improvements to this book, honestly.
I will list a few things I loved about this book below:

-the characters: They both have this great sense of humor, and they both are not their disease, but just themselves. They love to read, they care about their friends, their love is real, they are honest. Everyones should be like them - the disease...
-the story in general: Most of the books about kids with cancer are boring and just not my thing. This story was great, because it was not a normal cancer story. The characters were not boring, they were not sad, they do other things than suffer, they live. Things happen to them, even when they have cancer. It just seemed so realistic!
-the parts about the Netherlands: I, as a Dutch girl, do love to read about American *or from every other country* people visiting the Netherlands. I love to read about what other people think is stange about the coutry I live in, because to me it is just normal. And I love to read about prejudices made about Dutch people. This book included 'All Dutch people talk in lots of languages' 'there are coffeeshops on every corner of the street' and 'Dutch people dare to ask questions American people would not ask.' And you know, they all are *partly* true!
-the ending of the story: How on earth could you break my heart like this, John Green. This book changed my like. An ending like this will leave everyone heartbroken, and by that I mean EVERYONE! This is a very unusual ending, and it fitted the book so well. It was very sad and funny at the same time. It was like the characters, it was like it really happens. It almost seemed as if it were a non-fictional book. I even looked at the first page again, and read again the words of the author that really said that this was a work of fiction, which left me surprised
-how this book changed me: As Cassandra Clare once wrote: “One must always be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” This book has changed my view on the world. It showed me that we don't have infinity, and that we just have to make the best of the timee we have. It shows us that Dutch people really are lunatics, especially if they're from Amsterdam. It showed me that people that have cancer do not have to be sad always, because they are going to die. It showed me that books really do change your life. It showed me a way more things I had never really thought about before, and made me think about them a lot.
-how this book made me feel: I have never cried this much while reading a book. I have to be honest about this. I do not cry while reading very quick, but this book made me first cry around page 50, and I did not stop crying until hours after finishing this book. The day after reading this I looked like a zombie *in a bad way* and almost fell asleep during classed

John Green did live in Amsterdam for 2 months! In a street I have been to. John Green lived someplace I had been before. GOD lived in Amsterdam, in my country!! *freaks out*

conclusion:
run to your bookstore. Go buy this book! Is it night? Go to amazon/bookdepository/barnesandnoble/whatever and but this book! But only start reading it when you have enough time to read it in one sit, or you'll end up like a total zombie, like I ended up after reading till 4AM!!

total:
I would give this book a zillion stars out of five :)
100000000000000000000000/5 :) (or just 5/5, since that is the highest rating available...)

"Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.)"
-- a small slice of the affected wisdom of Hazel Grace, from The Fault In Our Stars by John Green.

Seemingly everybody, regardless of personal interest, occupation, social situation or general background, carries a list of books with such personal and cultural importance, resonance and transcendent ability to shape thoughts and ideas that may be dubbed as "essential". For many, such literary classics as Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Orwell's 1984 and Salinger's Catcher In the Rye are permanently engraved on this list. Perhaps, for others, Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are or Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy have mattered so much in the lives of their readers that they, too, are deemed essential. Regardless of exactly which books reside on these lists, what is truly important to highlight is how each and every one of these "essential" texts have been a transmutable participant in the journeys of the lives of countless individuals.

Which brings me to The Fault In Our Stars; John Green's sharply written, smartly balanced and, of course, essential tale centered around the "epic love story" of two teenager's suffering from the unfair, unpredictable and unrelenting human condition of dying from cancer.

For fans of Mr. Green's previous novels (Looking For Alaska, An Abundance Of Katherines and Paper Towns), the author's identifiable use of witty and pointed dialogue is utilized to great effect as he illustrates the stubborn strength in two individuals who refuse to be defined by their disease. Yet, while Hazel and Augustus are perceptively conscience of the strangeness of their lives, they sweetly cultivate and develop an intense and sagacious connection that is, altogether, distressingly endearing, deeply touching and genuinely heroic.

Stylistically, what Mr. Green surely excels at is never allowing the pulse of the narrative to get repetitive or predictable. Rather, the author is wonderful at unsettling the reader throughout at just the right moments. Just as he has in previous novels, Mr. Green utilizes a character revelation, from the perspective of the protagonist, to shift the paradigm and introduce a new sense of crisis and focus within the tightly directed narrative while still maintaining an honest sense of truth in the voice of the speaker.

Ultimately, Mr. Green possesses the enviable ability to articulate such a satiable level of understanding that unequivocally makes the journey of his stories an acutely unique experience. The Fault In Our Stars is a relentlessly engaging, humorous and affecting tale that will undoubtedly shape ideas, inspire action, influence personal conceptions and inevitably be called "essential".

I've been avoiding writing this review because I just don't think my tear ducts can handle it. But I need to do it because this is honestly one of the best books I have ever read. This is the first book by John Green that I have read, and I enjoyed his style immensely. His writing is witty and elevated, which only furthers the point that the main character is smart beyond her years. Hazel has cancer, but I could tell she is an old soul, forced to deal with circumstances that no teenager should. There are some main characters that I just can't stand in books because their wit turns into snark which turns into an annoying attempt at portraying teen angst. John Green drove the line between funny and obnoxious with perfection. There wasn't any point in the novel where I felt Hazel was a brat or annoying to listen to. In fact, all I wanted to do was hear her thoughts and keep reading to uncover her heartbreaking story.

Now on to the boy...Augustus Waters. At first I wasn't sure about him. Is he an arrogant jerk or is he that know it all guy you kind of love to hate? I quickly realized neither were true. I didn't ever want to hate him. Yes, he may be overly confident, but his heart is too large for him to be a jerk. He's the guy that was meant for Hazel and in their relationship you find a perfect story.

For me it's easier to write bad reviews than good ones. Because I just don't have much to say besides this book is amazing and you should read it immediately. My absolute favorite part of the book was when you realize why it's called The Fault in Our Stars. I won't give it away because its something you should read in the book.

And lastly, tissues are required for this. My face was a puddle of mascara when I was reading. The last hundred pages were the worst and I had a steady stream going for the entirety of them. But it was worth it.

I recommend this book for anyone who can read...seriously.