The Fault in Our Stars

by John Green

Okay, seriously, when did all the YA books get so depressing? I feel like society is sending children conflicting signals when they tell them to Play! and Enjoy being young! Have a childhood! Read about children dying of cancer! What?

That being said, it was, of course, an excellent book. I fell in love with the narrator right away. She's up front and honest her cancer and the fact that she's dying and how much that sucks. She is also very much a teenage girl. I actually had to double check that the book was written by a man because the narrator sounded so convincingly like a teenage girl.

This book was brilliant in the way it dealt with death and people dealing with death. There's humor and that's a lot of what pulled me into the book and kept me reading - just how funny it was. But it was a dark humor and it was never lost on the reader that the characters are using humor as a defense mechanism. Their situation is unbelievably difficult and unfair and sometimes the only way to deal with life when it gets like that is to laugh at it. Green made me laugh without detracting from the seriousness of his material and the talent that requires just blows my mind.

At the same time, he discusses the fact that we all deal with death in our own way. While August fears oblivion more than anything else, Hazel fears the pain she'll inflict on those left behind when she dies. The two positions are completely opposite to each other and yet it was extremely easy to understand both of them. We all look at the posts on a deceased's Facebook post and see all the messages of love and support (many, as this book points out, by people who hadn't seen the deceased for months, if not longer) and we all want that. We all want to feel that we'll be missed while we're gone.

At the same time, Hazel's point that that very desire is extremely selfish is a completely valid point. Why should we want to cause pain? She doesn't and, as August points out, that makes her a hero - among all the other "heroes" of cancer who "fought so hard" and "were an inspiration to us all".