The Fault in Our Stars: Better than "Okay"

Last year, I took a class called Advanced Expository Writing.  For this class, one of the assignments was to write a review of a movie, restaurant, book, or anything else we could think of.  Having just read John Green's much-anticipated (I pre-ordered it about seven months before it came out) The Fault in Our Stars just a few months before our professor gave this assignment, I chose to write about that book, largely because I can count on one hand how many books have made me cry and this was one of them.  Here is that review.

YA Author John Green

John Green, a New York Times Bestselling Author, is never short on poignant remarks.  The author, vlogger, former children’s hospital chaplain, and sometimes-historian recently released the young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars with Dutton Books.  After signing all 150,000 copies of the first printing of The Fault in Our Stars (henceforth Fault), Green’s dedication to his readers and his fan base has been proven.  Fault is an extraordinary, touching, insightful book that will, as Green hoped, “will make you feel all of the things!”

The first of his novels to be narrated by a female and inspired by both his time as a chaplain and Green fan Esther Earl, Fault begins in the “seventeenth year” of a young woman’s life whose name is Hazel Grace Lancaster.  Hazel, diagnosed with cancer in her early teens, is withdrawn and depressed according to her mother and doctor.  As a result, she begins attending group therapy where she meets Augustus Waters, a boy in remission.  Chronicling their time together, the book follows Hazel and her friends, her trip to Amsterdam, dealing with being a “grenade,” falling in love, and how “okay” comes to mean so much more.

Like Green’s other novels, Looking for Alaska; An Abundance of Katherines; Paper Towns; Will Grayson, Will Grayson; and Let It Snow, Fault is exceedingly smart and, while catching onto inside jokes (mostly from Green’s YouTube vlog) or allusions adds to the novel, the book is accessible and enjoyable no matter your level of obscure knowledge, something Green seems to enjoy packing into his stories.  These allusions are especially important because it says so much about Green’s attitude toward teens.  “Teenagers are plenty smart. I don’t sit around and worry whether teenagers are smart. I mean, most of the people currently reading The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby…are teenagers,” Green wrote on his blog, TFiOS Questions Answered, and reminds his viewers frequently in his YouTube vlog which he began with his younger brother, Hank, in 2007.

Cover for The Fault in Our Stars

This honest, insightful book both breaks and mends the heart at once, reminding the reader of their humanity.  Green attaches his reader to his characters with clever, if sometimes forgivably unrealistic, dialogue.  Meanwhile, his beautifully flowing sentences reminds the reader of the intricate and ornate phrasing of Shakespeare – his play Julius Caesar being the title’s inspiration – though decidedly more readable and modern.  The novel begins with one such sentence, quickly introducing the reader to Green’s lengthy, flowing style: “Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.”  Green’s style is not limited to list sentences and is often injected with splashes of humor, as later in the chapter in which he writes, “Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five…so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.”  These bursts of humor and conversational tone make the book comfortable despite the tragic circumstances of the main characters.

In reading Fault readers not only gain a new understanding of themselves and the world around them but also a whole community of other readers where Green is just another neighbor.  No matter your age this young adult novel will move you in a way no other novel has before or probably ever will.

* John Green’s official website is www.johngreebooks.com, and he can be followed on Tumblr at www.fishingboatproceeds.tumblr.com/.  For more information on The Fault in Our Stars, visit any of the previously mentioned websites for more links, including Green’s TFiOS Questions Answered blog.

John Green image courtesy of Daily Dot.
The Fault in Our Stars cover image courtesy of Wikipedia.