Skip to main content

A Review: The Fault in our Stars

The Fault in Our StarsThe Fault in Our Stars by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I tread lightly when venturing into "terminal disease" territory when it comes to books, movies, or TV shows. I approach the work (regardless of the medium) with more than a bit of caution. I don't want something that will be schmaltzy or emotionally manipulative. I don't want anything that shies away from the truth. More importantly, I'm worried that the story will resonate so clearly, it will upset me emotionally. With all of this in mind, I dug in to The Fault in our Stars with some degree of cautious optimism. I had heard Scott Simon's interview with John Green on Weekend Edition one Saturday and bought the book the following week. Green quotes the book in his interview, stating, "There is only one thing in this world [worse] than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer." With that quote, I understood fairly well that the author had done his research, knew what he was getting into,and wasn't going to shy away from the truth.


Once I started reading The Fault in our Stars, I couldn't put it down. From the very beginning, we are introduced to Hazel, a teenage cancer patient who has been battling disease for nearly half of her short life. In her narrative, I saw the mental and physical challenges that every cancer patient or cancer parent battles on a daily basis: that balance between finding support and seeking solace in depression, living one's life constantly on the edge of a terminal diagnosis, watching friends and family suffer at your expense, and surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals who may suffer the same fate. It's dangerous territory. You find yourself empathizing with people who face similar trials but you also face the reality that these people may leave your circle of friends. They may get sicker. They may face a recurrence. They might die and leave you behind. Worse: you might die and inflict additional pain and suffering on their lives.


All of these feelings are addressed in Hazel's relationships with her teenage peers, her parents, and her doctors. At one point, her mother is pushing Hazel towards more social relationships and Hazel resists. After further questioning, Hazel responds, "I'm like...a grenade, Mom. I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?" It is with that transparent honesty that Green addresses the issues of pediatric cancer that I've never seen in literature before. It's refreshing.


As Hazel's relationship with fellow teenage cancer survivor Augustus develops, their connecting point is a fictional work of literature that ties all of the characters together. Hazel and Gus search for information about An Imperial Affliction, a novel by the fictional Peter Van Houten. Van Houten's book about a female protagonist with cancer (coincidentally also named after a line from literature...how very "meta") drives the characters in their search for meaning, specifically: will the lives of those we hold so dear continue after we are gone? What happens "after"? How do we keep those we love from being hurt in this process? How do we appreciate today when the future is so volatile?


Tough stuff for teenagers to tackle.


In the end, I found an affinity for all of the characters in the book. I found myself reliving feelings (good and bad) around all of those experiences related to Charlotte's life, illness and death. This book more than lived up to my strict standards for the genre. It is a book I recommend as both a well crafted tale and a powerful story.


View all my reviews

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Edge of Seventeen

It's that time of year when the blog musings center on my grief journey. Every year, it seems like we are busy with end-of-the-year school activities and the start of summer, planning vacations, and then (kablam)...it's almost July 9.  Grief is funny. Grief is weird. I remember very early after Charlotte died, I watched the movie Rabbit Hole.  There's an amazingly poignant scene where Nicole Kidman's character is talking with another woman who lost a child over 10 years before (played by Dianne Wiest). She talks about grief being like a brick in your pocket. It never goes away. Sometimes you can even forget it's there. But it comes back and makes its presence known from time to time. And (she says) "it's what you have of them."    I probably did not fully realize then what a powerful and true analogy that is. As time goes on, our grief changes. Yet, it is always there on the edge of things. It sits in that pocket and sometimes makes itself known.  This

The Stages of Grief: COVID Edition

It's 2020. It's almost Christmas. We're still in the middle of a pandemic. In fact, we are experiencing what appears to be an incredible surge that is exerting tremendous pressure on our healthcare and social service system. The headlines are clear: we're not done with this madness and December 31, 2020 will not magically be the "end of it".  Earlier in the year, our family thought about whether we might be able to travel at this time. We thought that maybe the curve would be flat enough that we could take a few days away from home during the Christmas holidays. We realized that the pandemic would still be happening, but with the right protections and with prolific mask usage, we could get a much-needed change of scenery. During what is now (clearly) a delusional thought process, we booked a stay in Gatlinburg, Tennessee for the week of December 19th. Spoiler alert: we canceled the trip almost two weeks ago.  Canceling this trip was not a tragedy. In fact, I

Bittersweet Sixteen

I think about Charlotte every single day. However, this time of year, I'm flooded with all kinds of memories as we commemorate the anniversary of her birth. This year feels like a bit of a milestone. Sixteen.  If cancer had not taken her life back in 2010, I have a feeling I would be planning a massive birthday celebration this year. 16 always feels like a landmark year in someone's life.  I have been thinking a great deal about the last birthday party we had for Charlotte in 2009. We didn't know it at the time, but we were halfway through her treatment journey. We had been through three major brain surgeries and a few rounds of inpatient chemotherapy. Treatments were not going well. In fact, right after her birthday, we would make the trip to Houston, Texas where we would settle in for about 10 weeks of proton beam radiation treatments and a new customized chemotherapy protocol. This was the unspoken "last chance option" to beat that aggressive brain tumor into