Saturday, March 30, 2013

Sadness Between The Pages: A Book Review For "The Fault In Our Stars" by John Green

This book was finished on March 12, 2013.

I give The Fault In Our Stars a solid 3 stars

I'd like to preface this review with the disclaimer that I do not mean to be jerky however, my feelings in this review come from a place of wonderment at the state of emotion that come from bringing certain topics up in our society.

That being said, something that I find so interesting about stories that deal with illnesses is that they seem to skirt the issues of being sick and the "perks" that terminally ill people seem to receive. However, John Green stands stoically in his authorship and calls us all out on our bull****.

Both, Augustus and Hazel are made into optimistic if not angsty teenagers who are speeding toward oblivion furiously reaching out for a lifeline to keep them tethered to this world. While,I respect Green's writing style and story, I found that the characters themselves are not entirely new to literature. Hazel becomes the symbolic character that gets left behind once her boyfriend gets spirited off (no pun intended) to the after world and Augustus is the character who dies before his time. Together, their story while cute in some spots and heart-wrenchingly sad in others is not one that was fresh enough for me to fall down in total awe upon it's ending.

Yet, I can say that I was enticed by the idea that two people could go on this sort of journey together to excavate a story's ending from their favorite author half-way across the world. Green produces this adventure in a way that's so realistic that I found myself seriously thunderstruck when I got to the scene where Peter Van Houten denies these two cancer-ridden teenagers their last grand "wish." At this point in the story, I came to the conclusion that maybe what people like Augustus and Hazel really need is not so much our pity for them but, our understanding that they are really just individuals who are just like their "healthy" contemporaries who are searching for life's answers. Therefore, the one thing that seriously struck me in this novel is that people like Augustus and Hazel are no different than you or I. Like us, their death is inevitable. However, unlike us, they have a ballpark figure of when their final days are going to draw to a close.

Overall, I found the book to be an interesting and funny read with a light romance laced throughout the plot. I would recommend the book to others as a conversation starter but, not as a book that needs to be continuously read to understand it.

3 comments:

  1. Great review! Very much sums up a lot of my feelings when I read it as well. Thanks for stopping by my blog as well.

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