Title: The Fault in Our Stars

Author: John Green

Contemporary YA

Published January 10th 2012 by Dutton Juvenile

Goodreads summary:

Diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer at 12, Hazel was prepared to die until, at 14, a medical miracle shrunk the tumours in her lungs… for now.

Two years post-miracle, sixteen-year-old Hazel is post-everything else, too; post-high school, post-friends and post-normalcy. And even though she could live for a long time (whatever that means), Hazel lives tethered to an oxygen tank, the tumours tenuously kept at bay with a constant chemical assault.

Enter Augustus Waters. A match made at cancer kid support group, Augustus is gorgeous, in remission, and shockingly to her, interested in Hazel. Being with Augustus is both an unexpected destination and a long-needed journey, pushing Hazel to re-examine how sickness and health, life and death, will define her and the legacy that everyone leaves behind.

Review:

This can’t be appropriately called a review. How can I properly review a book that touched me as deeply as The Fault in Our Stars did? I even considered making a special format purely for this book before I decided to stick with the tried and true.

Looking for Alaska was the only John Green book that I’d read before. And don’t get me wrong. I loved it. It was beautifully written and literary and I think I summed it up with the word “wow.” But it didn’t touch me the way that The Fault in Our Stars did. I just– I don’t know how to say it better than other people have said it already. That Jodi Picoult blurb on the front? 100% agree.

I had a favorite quote from this book that I think sums up how I felt about it: “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.” I was falling in love with this book– with Hazel, with Augustus Waters, with how they interpret and describe the world around them. And before I knew it, I was in. There was no getting out of how I felt about the book and the characters and it all culminated in about 100 pages of mascara running down my faces as I huddled in my bed with a tissue and this book.

I always vaguely want to thank authors for writing– because obviously I love to read. But I want to thank John Green for writing something that made me feel ALL THE THINGS.

Overall rating: 5/5. Like my initial 1 sentence Goodreads review said: “John Green gets ALL the stars.”