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| ★★★★★ |
Synopsis: Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten.
***
Review: The Fault In Our Stars is exactly what I've wanted since the first time I read John Green's writing in Looking For Alaska.
It is not perfect - I never really gelled with the narrator, Hazel, and early on found myself saying I would feel more sorry for Augustus having to live without her than I would for her dying. I felt at times that the mask of an infatuated teenage girl was too thin to disguise the adult man writing beneath it. I copped onto what was really happening before it was revealed, and so to say the book was not a little predictable would be a lie, but it does not suffer for that, because for all my foresight, I still cried. A lot.
At its core it has that one element that distinguishes John Green's writing from all others, and which has been universally present across all his novels. That element is the perfectly articulated truth of reality - the reality of cancer and the reality of dying. It's easy to get swept up in the stories of his characters, compelling and blatently fictional as they are, and easy to get so swept up that you hope his books might end in the impossibly happy way they inevitably would - had anyone else in the world written them. But what you get with Green is reality, or at the very least, a beautifully expressed rendition of it. And that is what I love.
Bittersweet, melancholic, these are words I would use to describe Green's works, and TFIOS is no exception. Because you do, you ride the wave of emotionally-charged storytelling and even though in the end you are faced with a reality and not a dream, Green does not let you mourn that fact. He reminds you of all the reasons why the reality is, though often heart-breaking, an exquisite thing. TFIOS is sharp and witty too - with moments which will as soon make you burst out laughing as burst into tears. I come away from a book haunted by dying and its side-effects, feeling somewhat enlightened; having glimpsed some philosophical truth about what it is to be a person, and to be loved, and to be alive.
5/5
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