Review Detail

Let me start out by admitting there was no way I could look at this book with the kind of objectivity I normally cling to. Allow me to put my perspective into context:

1.) I'm a registered nurse, and the daughter of registered nurse. I recognize that morbid gallows humor is often an essential coping mechanism for both medical personnel and long-term patients. I'm not squeamish, and I have almost zero gag reflex. I grew up with medical terminology and have no concept of what may or may not be considered appropriate dinner table conversation.

2.) I'm closely familiar with cancer—both in terms of the victors and victims of its various ravaging forms. I've watched it weaken, mutilate, and kill without discrimination for age. And I know how much more intense it can seem when the inflicted is so very young. (Growing up I watched two high school friends and my 32-year-old neighbor battle for their lives.)

3.) My sister has Cystic Fibrosis. She has been living at the hospital for the last 8 months, her life and health in tenuous suspension as she awaits a compatible lung transplant.

So, now that you know a little more about where I'm coming from, I hope you can forgive me for not adoring this book. Not that I went into this expecting to love a Nicholas Sparks-style romantic tragedy with so much medical emphasis. I did hope, though, for the depth of philosophical thought and emotion that so many around me were going on about.

“You'll cry!” they promised. “Oh, the feels!”

I wanted them to be right. But the fact is, I didn't do a lot of feeling. I chuckled now and then, admired a few of the more poetic passages, frowned at nit-picky points of medical description... and in the end, walked away shaking off the mild aftertaste of defeatism.

I'll readily admit my timing might be way off. Or, perhaps, this book wasn't meant for someone like me at all. (As I understand it, it's doing a bang-up job of giving many folks an expanded sense of sympathy for those with cancer. For some, even instilling more awareness of their own mortality. I give it kudos on that front.)

The Fault In Our Stars is well paced, complex, and exceptionally readable. The prose has good flow, the sarcasm is biting, and the wording is clever. While the vocab choices may have slightly overindulged in pulling the cancer-caused profundity card, this reviewer stands firmly in the camp of people who appreciate it when a YA author doesn't talk down to their audience. I also found that John Green's writing style does agree with me enough that I'm now likely to pick up one of his other works.

Yet, at the same time...I never really connected with this particular story. Hazel was a part of my problem, I know. She was dying, and she didn't really seem to have a reason for living (aside from, well, keeping her parents from becoming no-longer-parents.) There was one nagging reason I had trouble finding her believable: her thought processes were such that I would have easily thought she'd ALWAYS been dying, rather than being diagnosed at age 13. In this regard, I found Augustus more multidimensional and, I dare say, likeable. He had the stronger sense of self and purpose. Which I'm sure was by design, but still, it's Hazel's POV we see everything from.

I realize I sound like a horrible, callous person for criticizing the character of a suffering cancer patient—however fictional she may or may not be. (On that note, is there a way of not adoring this book without looking like a complete jerk? >.>)

I presume this is the sort of heavy “issues” book that's supposed to make the reader think. To that end, it succeeded with me. But I spent a great deal of my time thinking on the differences in worldview and mindsets in all the young people I've known who dealt with fatal and potentially fatal illnesses. I also dwelt quite a bit on the differences between those who've been diagnosed with things like cancer and more or less had their futures snatched away from them, and those born with life-long terminal ailments like Cystic Fibrosis who never have a chance to be blissfully ignorant of their own mortality.