Pain is Meant to Be Felt: Review of John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars”

Hazel is dying of cancer, but that revelation is hardly news to her.  In fact, she would have been dead years ago if a new, experimental cancer drug hadn’t chosen her as one of the few to work on.  Even with the help of the drug Hazel still knows her days are numbered, and her parents do too, which is why her mother has decided Hazel needs to go to a support group with other kids going through the same thing.  That’s where Hazel meets Augustus, another cancer patient, who turns Hazel’s world around.

Their relationship builds over the mutual love of a book written b the elusive Peter Van Houten and their story builds as they try to find answers to his book, which ends mid-sentence as the narrator dies of cancer (or at least that’s what the reader has to assume).

As with all John Green books this one is well written and emotional with

characters you have to love because of how endearing he makes them.  I enjoyed this book, I cried at the ending, I loved Hazel and her spirit, but this is not a book I’d read again.  This is the kind of book where the magic can only happen once.  I’m afraid that if I read the book for a second time I’m only going to pick up on the flaws, a relationship between Hazel and Augustus that feels force, the unrealisticness of the trip, and a reclusive author with a story that just didn’t make sense.  I don’t want to analyze this book.  I want to enjoy it for what it was and set it aside.  (This will, unfortunately, not be a possibility as I have to teach this book in the spring and will, by definition be forced to overthink and analyze it).

Green has done his research before writing this book and is perfectly candid about things that he makes up or drugs that don’t really exist yet.  But no matter how much research you do it is impossible to know what goes on in the mind of a teen dying of cancer without being one.

This is a book that pulls at your heart strings and plays on your emotions.  Just by the nature of the topic it is impossible to feel nothing when you read this book and Green creates a story that lives up to his previous work.