The Fault in Our Stars

Soon to be a major motion picture, The Fault in Our Stars is a young adult novel about a teenage girl with cancer who falls in love with a boy with cancer. Now that sounds awful, like a teen-aged version of Love Story, but it is to John Green's credit that he has written a book that transcends age demographics, and resists sentimentality.

Our narrator is Hazel Lancaster, a sixteen-year-old girl with cancer. She is living on borrowed time, forced to lug around an oxygen canister, and home schooled. She is remarkably clear-eyed about her situation: "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."

Her parents, especially her mother, are smothering, and urge her to get out more. She does, attending a cancer support group, where she meets Augustus Waters, a beautiful boy who lost a leg to cancer, but is otherwise in good health. He is instantly smitten, and the romance gets started, in fits and starts. He introduces her to his favorite movie (V for Vendetta) and she to her favorite book, written by the reclusive Peter Van Houten, a novel that famously ends in the middle of a sentence.

Augustus, who has not used his "wish" from the Genie Foundation (obviously a stand-in for the Make a Wish Foundation) arranges to use it so he and Hazel can fly to Amsterdam, meet Van Houten, and find out what happens to the characters in his book after the abrupt ending. Of course, things don't go as hoped, and there's the inevitable, given that we're talking about kids with cancer, tragic turn.

I liked this book a great deal, although I think some of the hosannas are a bit much. It is very well written and very funny at times, but it's a bit precious. Hazel and Augustus are very precocious, especially Augustus, who is one of those guys who is always "on," such as responding to questions of how are you by saying, "Grand." I can see how this book may be very popular with girls, as Augustus is idealized. Here is how he professes his love to Hazel: "'I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll have, and I am in love with you." Wow.

Green has done his research on kids with cancer, and this book is a model for how to deal with anyone with a terminal disease, because most of us without one have no clue how to behave around someone in that situation. We get certain insights into their daily lives, such as: "Cancer perks are the little things cancer kids get that regular kids don't: basketballs signed by sports heroes, free passes on late homework, unearned driver's licences, etc."

The film, coming out next year, will star the amazing Shailene Woodley as Hazel. I can't wait for that.