Book Review: John Green – “The Fault In Our Stars”

This is going to be a very different review of the book than my wonderful friend Laura – on who’s behalf I bought and read it, – did on her blog. You can read it here http://mysticmonkey86.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/wow/. It’s a wonderful review of hers, trust me.

Anyway, back to the book. I totally agree with Laura: the book is cruel. It’s excruciatingly gruesome, reading about a sixteen-year-old girl named Hazel that is supposed to have her entire life infront of her but has to face the fact that it will be way shorter than expected every day because she’s been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. The Support Group her parents put her into is never more than a dull experience that she goes through with her mind drifting somewhere else. To everyone, she appears as heroic, a fighter, because she lived already three years longer than her doctors ever thought she would, thanks to oxygen tanks and strong meds.

Then her life changes when she meets Augustus Waters at one of these Support Group meetings.

Just as Laura, the moment he shows up in the book, I am in total awe for him. He’s witty, never gets tired of snippy comments, goes through life with literally living by the motto “Live everydays as if it would be your last”. And that is one of the things I have the highest respect for. He shows Hazel how much life still has to offer even when you’re terminally ill, I’d go so far as to say that he shows her the stars without having to ride up to the sky, if that makes sense. He makes me want to have someone like that in my life, who doesn’t care who somebody is, what they look like, if they’re sick or healthy, someone who just takes another person the way they are, no questions asked. My favourite part therefor is – without a doubt, – the one where he lets his best friend Isaac do something so essentially freeing (at least in my opinion) and, at the same time, selfless, while talking to Hazel as if nothing could be bothering him, that you have no other option than to fall for him head over heels (if he wasn’t a fictional character, of course). I loved that part. Deeply.

What I don’t share with Laura is the fact how much this book touched me deep inside. Yes, I was sitting on the tram to work with my jaw literally wide open when I got to the part where something is revealed that I would’ve never expected to happen at all. Yes, I had to pull myself together to not start crying in public. And yes, it was the cruelest turn I would have imagined in a book where I thought there couldn’t lie any surprises for me. From that page on, I couldn’t stop reading, and I read through the rest of the book like there was no tomorrow.

But fact also is: I didn’t really like the end. I mean…John Green makes such a big fuss about Hazel’s favourite book that ends just midsentence, with so many questions still unanswered…and in some way, that’s exactly what he does to his own book. I still have questions. And it bugs me. It might be a stroke of genius, but still. It bugs me.

Plus…call me cold-hearted, unemotional or whatever, but the book just didn’t change me. I say it again, it’s cruel to read about such an intense subject, it really is, but I’m not sitting here now, thinking how short life is. Basically, because I do that all day. There is nothing I fear more than dying, and I’m fighting the thought of it every single day to the hardest. I’m not seeing the beauty in everything now, I live my life exactly the way I did before.

I admire the talent John Green has proven with this book, and I understand why it has become such a best seller – because it is. But for me, no matter how heart-wrenching, touching and impressing it was…I read better ones. Who knows, maybe it’s just because I normally read completely different kind of books.  Maybe I just don’t get the book. Maybe I just don’t get the message it carries with it. Maybe I’m just amazingly stupid.

But what I do think is: John Green has written about one of the most delicate subjects mankind knows, and he has done it well. Very well. His writing skill is amazing, and the way he’s presented the characters to the reader is stunning. He deserves all the praise he has ever gotten and will ever get for this novel.

He didn’t totally reach me with it, but that does not, in any way, diminish his talent. Go read the book for yourself, make up your own mind and decide how you feel about it. Because this is the most beautiful thing about books: everyone has a different view of them, everyone sees something different in them, decides for themselves the effect is has on them.

And sometimes, they can even change lives. Just as Augustus did change Hazel’s life.