The Fault in Our Stars

xxpish - Ok, if you haven’t read this book, WHAT ARE YOU DOING????!!!!!???? SUMMARY: Hazel has cancer. She has had it for a while now, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any better. She is taking her meds, and attending support group. Her life is pretty predictable. But during one support group meeting, she meets Augustus—a kind and compassionate young man who is a cancer veteran. Augustus is a sophisticated young man; he is scared of oblivion, “smokes” cigarettes, but doesn’t light them because it is a metaphor. ” You put the killing thing in your mouth, but don’t let it do the killing.” As Hazel starts hanging out with Augustus, “she falls in love with him the way he falls asleep; slowly, then all at once.” Hazel introduces him to her favorite book, An Imperial Affliction, and he is soon engrossed in it as well, and the rapid end of the book has them searching for answers. As much a love story as a story centered about a book, this heartstring-tugging cancer love story WILL make you cry. THOUGHTS: I can not even begin to tell you how much I loved this book. I just can’t. It was SO FLIPPING GOOD. It is a perfect book. Beautiful. I don’t know where to begin. Okay, okay (haha, lol). John Green’s writing was incredible. You can tell that he is sage and knows how to write—because this novel was written flawlessly. The characters were so real and you fell in love with them as they did each other. To give you an idea—I did cry. See picture at bottom. This book is definitely a “feels” book. Augustus is a genuine character; a caring, metaphor-loving, honest, meaningful person. I thought it was really cool that this book was kind of partly centered around this one book that they both loved. It was pretty cool, seeing them trying to get in contact with the secluded author. This book had so many perfect quotes—I highlighted so many passages from the book on my Kindle. I can not stop raving about this book, and I am so excited to see the movie because I want more TFIOS in my life. It is going to make me cry even more than the book made me cry. I loved this book so much and I can not wait to pick up Paper Towns, which I just got!

Starred review from January 16, 2012
If there's a knock on John Green (and it's more of a light tap considering he's been recognized twice by the Printz committee) it's that he keeps writing the same book: nerdy guy in unrequited love with impossibly gorgeous girl, add road trip. His fourth novel departs from that successful formula to even greater success: this is his best work yet. Narrator Hazel Grace Lancaster, 16, is (miraculously) alive thanks to an experimental drug that is keeping her thyroid cancer in check. In an effort to get her to have a life (she withdrew from school at 13), her parents insist she attend a support group at a local church, which Hazel characterizes in an older-than-her-years voice as a "rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness." Despite Hazel's reluctant presence, it's at the support group that she meets Augustus Waters, a former basketball player who has lost a leg to cancer. The connection is instant, and a (doomed) romance blossoms. There is a road tripâAugustus, whose greatest fear is not of death but that his life won't amount to anything, uses his "Genie Foundation" wish to take Hazel to Amsterdam to meet the author of her favorite book. Come to think of it, Augustus is pretty damn hot. So maybe there's not a new formula at work so much as a gender swap. But this iteration is smart, witty, profoundly sad, and full of questions worth asking, even those like "Why me?" that have no answer. Ages 14âup. Agent: Jodi Reamer, Writers House.

Starred review from January 15, 2012
He's in remission from the osteosarcoma that took one of his legs. She's fighting the brown fluid in her lungs caused by tumors. Both know that their time is limited. Sparks fly when Hazel Grace Lancaster spies Augustus "Gus" Waters checking her out across the room in a group-therapy session for teens living with cancer. He's a gorgeous, confident, intelligent amputee who always loses video games because he tries to save everyone. She's smart, snarky and 16; she goes to community college and jokingly calls Peter Van Houten, the author of her favorite book, An Imperial Affliction, her only friend besides her parents. He asks her over, and they swap novels. He agrees to read the Van Houten and she agrees to read his--based on his favorite bloodbath-filled video game. The two become connected at the hip, and what follows is a smartly crafted intellectual explosion of a romance. From their trip to Amsterdam to meet the reclusive Van Houten to their hilariously flirty repartee, readers will swoon on nearly every page. Green's signature style shines: His carefully structured dialogue and razor-sharp characters brim with genuine intellect, humor and desire. He takes on Big Questions that might feel heavy handed in the words of any other author: What do oblivion and living mean? Then he deftly parries them with humor: "My nostalgia is so extreme that I am capable of missing a swing my butt never actually touched." Dog-earing of pages will no doubt ensue. Green seamlessly bridges the gap between the present and the existential, and readers will need more than one box of tissues to make it through Hazel and Gus' poignant journey. (Fiction. 15 & up)

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Starred review from February 1, 2012

Gr 9 Up-"It's not fair," complains 16-year-old Hazel from Indiana. "The world," says Gus, her new friend from her teen support group, "is not a wish-granting factory." Indeed, life is not fair; Hazel and Gus both have cancer, Hazel's terminal. Despite this, she has a burning obsession: to find out what happens to the characters after the end of her favorite novel. An Imperial Affliction by Dutch author Peter Van Houten is about a girl named Anna who has cancer, and it ends in mid-sentence (presumably to indicate a life cut short), a stylistic choice that Hazel appreciates but the ambiguity drives her crazy. Did the "Dutch Tulip Man" marry Anna's mom? What happened to Sisyphus the Hamster? Hazel asks her questions via email and Van Houten responds, claiming that he can only tell her the answers in person. When she was younger, Hazel used her wish-one granted to sick children from The Genie Foundation-by going to Disney World. Gus decides to use his to take Hazel to Amsterdam to meet the author. Like most things in life, the trip doesn't go exactly as anticipated. Van Houten is a disappointment, but Hazel, who has resisted loving Gus because she doesn't want to be the grenade that explodes in his life when she dies, finally allows herself to love. Once again Green offers a well-developed cast of characters capable of both reflective thought and hilarious dialogue. With his trademark humor, lovable parents, and exploration of big-time challenges, The Fault in Our Stars is an achingly beautiful story about life and loss.-Ragan O'Malley, Saint Ann's School, Brooklyn, NY

Copyright 2012 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2012
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* At 16, Hazel Grace Lancaster, a three-year stage IVcancer survivor, is clinically depressed. To help her deal with this, her doctor sends her to a weekly support group where she meets Augustus Waters, a fellow cancer survivor, and the two fall in love. Both kids are preternaturally intelligent, and Hazel is fascinated with a novel about cancer called An Imperial Affliction. Most particularly, she longs to know what happened to its characters after an ambiguous ending. To find out, the enterprising Augustus makes it possible for them to travel to Amsterdam, where Imperial's author, an expatriate American, lives. What happens when they meet him must be left to readers to discover. Suffice it to say, it is significant. Writing about kids with cancer is an invitation to sentimentality and pathosor worse, in unskilled hands, bathos. Happily, Green is able to transcend such pitfalls in his best and most ambitious novel to date. Beautifully conceived and executed, this story artfully examines the largest possible considerationslife, love, and deathwith sensitivity, intelligence, honesty, and integrity. In the process, Green shows his readers what it is like to live with cancer, sometimes no more than a breath or a heartbeat away from death. But it is life that Green spiritedly celebrates here, even while acknowledging its pain. In its every aspect, this novel is a triumph. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Green's promotional genius is a force of nature. After announcing he would sign all 150,000 copies of this title's first print run, it shot to the top of Amazon and Barnes & Noble's best-seller lists six months before publication.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)