It goes against nature. A book whose teenage protagonists are dying of cancer shouldn't make you smile, but it does. Again and again and again. And laugh out loud too. There's been an awful lot written about John Green's publishing phenomenon; The Fault In Our Stars, but I'm sorry, I have to add to the chatter in the blog-o-sphere. I can't let this one without adding my four penneth.
This is a beautiful, beautiful book. The characters are so coruscatingly real that simply writing about them still brings tears to my eyes. The Fault In Our Stars is a line from Shakespeare, and the tale is pure tragedy but with a twist, a twist that should put a spring in your step and a smile on your face. Look beyond the canular tubes and the oxygen tanks, the phalanxifor (made up cancer medicine) that keeps Hazel Grace Lancaster alive well beyond her bleak prognosis and we get an opportunity to see, feel and experience how very precious life is. This close to death we really feel alive, we really get that totally unique never-to-be-repeatedness of every moment.
Hazel - the book's written in a very convincing first person POV (point of view) - is our heroine. She's dying of secondary cancers which are gnawing away at her lungs, reducing their efficiency, meaning she has to pull an oxygen tank on a trolley around with her. She goes to a support group in a church where other teenagers dying of cancer gather in a kind of mawkish group hug to stoically urge each other "to live our best lives today!" But mawkish this book isn't, for Hazel falls in love with Augustus Waters, an elegantly beautiful cancer-survivor who's absorbed more joie de vivre in his short and difficult life than most of us manage over the entire span. He is philosophical, clever, sensitive, funny and so intense you sit up straighter when he walks onto the page. He is everything we'd all want to be. He dangles an unlit cigarette from his mouth at key moments, not to smoke - what giddy craziness that would be - but as a metaphor for his continued existence. "I have it between my lips but I don't give it the power to kill me by lighting it."
Augustus and Hazel fall in love, crazy, giddy-love, made all the more poignant - but never in a sentimentally fluffy way - by the death watch tick tock of their illnesses. She's on the edge, but in this position, with the wind from the precipice blowing in her face she can truly feel alive. Augustus Waters has been in remission since the osteosarcoma that was threatening his life responded to chemo and he had his leg preventatively loped off just below the knee. These are young people who represent the best of what humanity has to offer, they are free-thinking despite the heavy chain of mortality. The clarity of the dialogue leaves you breathless, Green spent some time amongst children suffering from cancer and you can hear that experience in his every cadence. There's heaps of gallows humour, but amongst it a sense of the urgency and engagement with all experience that the worried well never achieve.
There's much adolescent existentialist philosophising here, but it's never pretentious because if people who are quite literally on the edge can't explore such deep waters who's going to? The talk is clever, genuine and poignant as well as being insightful. The book spares no blushes or pulls no punches, we witness the surgery of a friend of Hazel and Augustus from support group. It's a Hobson's Choice surgery that saves his life but at the expense of his cancer-riddled remaining eye, making him permanently blind. Poor Isaac rehearses for us an idea that crops up through the book as Hazel worries about falling in love with Augustus. Before the operation to take away his one good eye, Isaac's girlfriend dumps him, unable to bare the thought she might one day have to break it off with a blind boy. This of course would be so horribly mean, so, she reasons, not irrationally - the narrative even let's us explore this perspective - she decides to get it done before the op. Hazel agonises about becoming just such an emotional grenade for Augustus as her terminal prognosis, though paused by the drug trial, is still very much a dead cert. She doesn't want to destroy him in when she dies and he is left all alone.
But love finds a way and Hazel and Augustus, as they so beautifully put it, fall deep into a quantum entanglement all their own. This book is clever, sassy, honest, witty and deeply, deeply respectful of its subject matter without ever becoming sentimental. Hazel provides just the right voice, a voice suffused with wisdom and a desperate sorrow at her situation, without ever wet with self-pity.
A novel of death and life and love and suffering and how we survive. The loving, meaningful portrayal of the courage of Hazel and Augustus's parents is also very touching. We're left with the impression that our own sensibilities about engaging with such people - those branded with a terminal diagnosis and their devastated families - leaves us shadows of the brave people they are. Yes, they're close to death, yes they're possibly literally counting the breaths to the end, but during that time, despite the debilitating sickness, they are possibly more alive than many people with the luxury of many more years ahead of them. This books stares death in the face and it's the sallow-faced reaper who blinks because life in the midst of death is as poignant and wonderful and sad as a soon-to-be broken butterfly.
You have to read this book. Right now.
A very rare five stars *****
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Popular highlights in this book
I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.Highlighted by 9,218 Kindle readers- “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.”Highlighted by 7,407 Kindle readers
- “Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.”Highlighted by 6,444 Kindle readers
A truly amazing gripping book!
I recently finished reading 'The Fault in our Stars' and I have to say that John Green has written an amazing book. This book is very interesting and is now my second favourite book. The main characters in the book are Hazel Grace and Augustus Waters. They meet at a cancer support group and their love story is incredibly heart-warming. However, the story takes a dark turn which shows the more realistic side of life, rather than the typical fairy tale ending. The story is truly gripping and keeps you interested and you build such a strong relationship with the characters that it can be truly devastating when you discover the truth of cancer and what it can really do to a person. Not only do you feel sympathetic towards Hazel, you also feel sympathetic towards her parents and I highly recommend that you check out this book if you haven't already read it. If this review was helpful, please click the thumbs up button. It really helps me out! :)
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 February 2014
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Cliente de AmazonReviewed in Mexico on 25 January 2022
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