When it’s clear that you’ll die, you don’t want to destroy the lives of people you love. But sometimes you cannot choose.
Hazel Grace Lancaster is going to die. A sixteen-year-old girl with cancer and with no existing will to go to the Support Group meeting in Jesus Christ’s heart (literally). But then, she meets this one guy, Gus or Augustus, this young seventeen-year-old men with one „real“ leg, who compares her to Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta. She likes him, she really likes him, but it’s not going to work. Because she doesn’t know, when it’s going to end, when the cancer will grow again, when her lungs are going to stop to work at all. She doesn’t want to fall in love, because she knows, that death is only hurting the people around you. But you cannot choose who you love, or when, or how.
John Green
born 1977 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
Other works:
- Looking for Alaska (german review here)
- Paper Towns
After reading „Looking for Alaska“ I always wanted to read another Green book. I love his language and his talent, to write both mysterious and funny, heart-warming and cruel. And therefore I bought the eBook auf „The Fault in Our Stars“. After two or three days (that’s fast for me), I finished the last digital page. It’s an incredible book: a story about illness, about cancer, a story about losing. A story about love, about live, about loss. A book to laugh and to cry. The story of Hazel and Augustus is – as many critics say – an outstanding love story. And it will be an incredible movie too. (Attention: the trailer spoilers some of the essential things of the book – but if you love the trailer, you have to read the book anyway.)
There are so many loveable characters in the book: Hazel, her parents, Gus, Isaac … yes, and even the author Peter Van Houten and Patrick, the guy who always guides through the Support Group meetings. Green’s language is wonderful, his humour (around all this circumstances) is great. „The Fault in Our Stars“ handles taboos, no one wants to talk or even think about: Cancer, the death of a children, the children’s thoughts about loss, even they are the loss themselves. It’s no kitschy book about love, it’s a honest trip through love and distance, death and silence.
„You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.“
You aren’t human if you don’t get tears in your eyes while reading this book. It’s such a wonderful story, such great characters, such a lovely love. And because I loved that book so much, I even bought the newly published paperback-version of „Das Schicksal ist ein mieser Verräter“, the translated German version, and started reading it right away. Buy it, read it, love it! And maybe we will see us in the cinema this summer!
John Green
The Fault in Our Stars
Penguin Books
Price: 7,20 Euro (Paperback), 3,99 Euro (eBook) (Information about partnerlinks)
316 pages