The Fault in Our Stars

Read this and other reviews at [...]. Okay, so to say a book changed my life is pretty serious business. This book, though, is serious. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green has changed my life. I couldn't decide if it ruined me. Or fixed me. I've decided to go with fixed me. In all honesty, a series changed my life last year - Fifty Shades of Grey - seems strange, maybe, but it's the truth. It opened me up to this whole other world of books, those independently published, prompted me to write reviews, and therefore start this blog, and since then meet so many amazing people and cultivate amazing friendships. Last spring, I came across The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. I read the synopsis, saw it was getting high praise, and then I chickened out. I couldn't have run faster. Young people. Cancer. No. Way. Generally, I'm a sucker when it comes to subjects like this anyway - I always watch Beaches or Steel Magnolias, but damnit, even though I know what happens, I still can't manage to not lie in the fetal position and snot all over myself. {{"That's the thing about pain...it demands to be felt."}} A couple months went by, and I crossed paths with some other avid readers, like myself, all who were SCREAMING for people to read this book. I always felt there was no way I could broach this. My husband's brother passed away in January 2011 (two years ago today, to be exact). My son was 5 weeks old, and it was a horribly dark time. So bittersweet. We had this awesome baby, and then Tim's (my husband) twin brother was dying. I knew reading this story would open up a lot of feelings I remember having in regards to Jeff's cancer, but more importantly to the way it affected my husband and my in-laws. I said at one point, not long after I had Cohen, that I could not ever imagine burying my child. John Green pointed this out for me not far into TFiOS. {{There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.}} I fell in love with the characters (all of them), the writing and the story from page one. While I knew it was going to be a sad story, the way that John presented the subject was beautiful. It's amazing how connected to fictional characters you can become, and this was never truer than when reading this story. John was able to lace amazing humor, sarcasm, romance, and HONESTY, so much honesty into this, that it was impossible to put down, even while crying so hard, I couldn't see the screen of my iPad. {{It seemed like forever ago, like we'd had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.}} Yes, as I predicted, this story ripped me open, but it did much more than that. It truly put me back together in way that I didn't realize I was broken. It amazes me how much you can love and learn from people that aren't real. John is a genius. He created these characters that grab you IMMEDIATELY and don't let go. Ever. I finished this over a week ago, and have since found myself re-reading certain parts on numerous occasions. I wasn't even going to review it, to be completely honest, because I knew ^^^ this would occur. Just a whole lot of nonsensical rambling, with some memorable quotes interspersed. I know I'm not doing it justice. And no one can. It just must has to be experienced and felt. {{I want to leave a mark.}} The day after reading this, I crawled into bed with my son (he's 2) and had a long talk with him. He just stared at me, babbled on about the humidifier, his train table and the stars and moon. I knew, though, this story made me think. It gouged out some stuff in me, and hopefully I can be a better version of myself because of it. I was then watching Private Practice and Sheldon (one of the doctors on the show) said something that reminded me so much of this story, and just life in general. And its importance. {{The petty things, they don't matter - the things we argue about and wish we could change about another person: none of that matters. What matters is having someone there to hold your hand if you have cancer.}} Not everyone is so lucky to have that. But many are. I know for my husband, his family found comfort in the fact that Jeff had that. And I know someday I'd have that. It is easy to take for granted, but this book reminded me how important it is to make extra sure NOT to take advantage of this. And of life. I hope that if you're scared to read this, you'll give it a chance. Yes, it's a sad story. But it's more than that. And it deserves to be read for the reasons other than it's sad. Life is sad, sometimes; in fact, a lot of times, life is sad. And unfair. But reading a story like this, reminded me that even in the saddest of moments, for people in the worst circumstances, there's still happiness, and things can be okay. I'm not sure how I'll change my life, but I know it's already changed. And will keep changing. SIDE NOTE TANGENT (again): In John's speaking engagement at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night he said, the true character of a hero is not being able to go from weakness to strength, but rather strength to weakness. I got goosebumps when he said that and I couldn't possibly agree more - especially when it comes to writing an obituary and the wording of so and so "lost his/her battle with cancer" -- there is no losing the battle. Fighting it at all is winning, suffering is winning, and being the kind of hero that lives through this is NEVER losing the battle. Unfortunately Cohen never got to meet Jeff because of all sorts of crappy circumstances at the end. But we know that he's left his mark and Cohen will know just great his Uncle Jeff was. It's nice that today, of all days, I've finally gotten this review up and written and it can serve to be a great remembrance of him. You don't get to know how long you'll be here for, but never underestimate your mark on the world. Oh - and in case I didn't make myself clear - read this book. Okay? Okay.

The best stories are about memory. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is quite possibly the best standalone novel I have ever read and is certainly the most phenomenal book I’ve had the privilege to experience in the year 2013. It is my third favorite story and favorite non-fantasy novel. The title comes from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and it sets the perfect tone for this story written in the first person by Hazel, a sixteen year old girl in the regressive stage of lung cancer who nevertheless is required to cart around an oxygen tank because (as she so perfectly puts it) her “lungs suck at being lungs.” Her mother forces her to go to a cancer patient/survivor group where she proceeds to exercise her considerable teenage snark and wit along with her friend Isaac who is suffering from a type of cancer that eventually requires the removal of an eye. One day Hazel catches the attention of a boy named Augustus and their romance is as breathtaking and expedient as it is completely genuine and uncontrived. Augustus has recovered from bone cancer that left him with a prosthetic leg, but did nothing to diminish his spirit. She can scarcely believe he’s as perfect as he projects and indeed feels as though she’s found his hamartia or fatal flaw when he puts a cigarette in his mouth. Hazel is of course livid that anyone who survived cancer would willingly place themselves into its way again, but Augustus never lights them using the act as a metaphor of having “the killing thing right between your teeth, but you not giving it the power to do its killing.” Both of them together have enough wit and snark to drown the world in metaphors and sarcasm with just the barest dash of bitterness for their plight. Hazel whom Augustus calls “Hazel Grace” for most of the novel feels incredibly guilty that she’s allowed Augustus to fall for her as she and her family expect her cancer to return full force at any moment, and yet their relationship parallels the ever moving train of her mortality. So much so that Hazel shares with him that her favorite book is a story by the reclusive author Peter Van Houten called An Imperial Affliction. “My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, but I didn’t like to tell people about it. Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising that affections feels like a betrayal.” Van Houten’s work is very meta to the larger story at hand being about a girl named Anna who suffers from cancer and her one-eyed mother who grows tulips. But Hazel makes it very clear that this is not a cancer book in the same way that The Fault in Our Stars is not a cancer book. Anna grows progressively sicker and her mother falls in love with a Dutch Tulip Man who has a great deal of money and exotic ideas about how to treat Anna’s cancer, but just when the DTM and Anna’s mom are about to possibly get married and Anna is about to start a new treatment, the book ends right in the middle of a- Exactly. This drives Hazel and eventually Augustus up the wall to not know what happened to everyone from Anna’s hamster Sisyphus to Anna herself. Hazel assumes that Anna became too sick to continue writing (the assumption being that her story was first person just as Hazel’s is), but for Van Houten to not have finished it seems like the ultimate literary betrayal. As terrified as Hazel was to share this joy with Augustus (and god knows I understand that feeling) it was the best thing she could’ve done because they now share the obsession and the insistence that the characters deserve an ending. The conversations of Hazel and Augustus are not typical teenage conversations, but they’re not typical teenagers. Mortality flavors all of their discussions and leads to elegance such as “The tales of our exploits will survive as long as the human voice itself. And even after that, when the robots recall the human absurdities of sacrifice and compassion, they will remember us.” They speak of memory and calculate how there are fourteen dead people for everyone alive and realize that remembering fourteen people isn’t that difficult. We could all do that if we tried that way no one has to be forgotten. But will we then fight over who we are allowed to remember? Or will the fourteen just be added to those we can never forget? They read each other the poetry of T.S Eliot, the haunting lines of Prufrock, “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Til human voices wake us, and we drown.” And as Augustus reads Hazel her favorite book she “…fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” The quotes from this story are among the most poignant and beautiful I have ever seen. “Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.” “There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.” When I finished this I thought to myself, “How am I going to read anything else? How will I find something to match this? How can I pick up another book and not expect it to resonate with this haunting beauty, this tragedy ringed with comic teenage snark and tones that are themselves tragic in their sarcasm like whistling in the ninth circle of hell or laughing uproariously at the monster?” I realized I was lost. I could think of no negative critique unless you count the fact that the two main characters have Dawson’s Creek Syndrome where they’re teenagers who speak as if they were philosophers, but then again Bill Watterson did the same thing with a boy and a stuffed tiger. You realize the story’s hamartia doesn’t matter. That the fact that the plot may be cliched is unimportant and that dwelling on such trivialities is in and of itself a fatal flaw. This story is so much more than the letters and words on each page. It’s the triumph of morning over night when the night grows ever longer. It’s the dream of hope when you’ve done nothing but dine on despair. It is sad? Yes. It is heartbreaking? More so. Is it worth reading? Has anything sad and heartbreaking not been worth reading? The story of Hazel and Augusts deserves to be read just as the story of Anna, her mother, and dear hamster Sisyphus deserves an ending, and that becomes their exploit to seek out reclusive Peter Van Houten so that the characters can be properly laid to rest and remembered. The best stories are about memory.

What Occurs: Despite the medical miracle that shrunk her tumours, buying her a few more years in this good old world, Hazel has never been anything other than terminal. But when she meets Augustus Waters at her Cancer Support Group every person in the world with a heart melts and cries and both curses and falls in love with John Green (just a heads up). Thoughts: 'Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read that book.' - Hazel John Green is probably one of the most awesome people on the planet (Nerdfighters are living proof of this. As is Crash Course). That being said: JOHN GREEN WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO TO ME WITH THIS BOOK?! I'll be honest, this review probably won't do Green's masterpiece justice. So I will begin by saying this: there are books and then there are books like this. This is a book that'll change how you see the world and will allow you to connect with each character on a truly deep emotional level. You will laugh when they laugh and cry when they cry. And you will fall in love right alongside them. One of the best things about TFiOS is that the characters aren't 'dumbed down' so they sound more 'teenager' (whatever that even means). John Green writes realistic, authentic, smart protagonists who make mistakes and screw up but are also capable of poignant and intelligent thought. Hazel was witty and self-deprecating and completely human (Mary Sue, who?). John Green does a great job of adopting the female narrative and Hazel is hands-down my favourite YA heroine. She's just hilarious. She's also bad-ass and the way she thinks of death and deals with her illness challenges preconceptions of 'cancer kids' and is honestly riveting and awesome. And Augustus? Well, I challenge you not to fall in love with him. He's adorable and vulnerable and sincere and optimistic and brave and defiant and SO FRICKEN FUNNY. He's the teenage boy we all wish was our first love. This isn't a book with insta-love. This is a book that shows you what true love really is. A love that's not dependent on how 'hot' someone is, but on how truly amazing they are. But I what I do want to stress is that this isn't just another romance novel. It's a love story. Between Augustus and Hazel, between Hazel and her parents, between Augustus and his best friend and between them and the world and life. Also? This book isn't one big 'sob story'. John Green, seemingly effortlessly, avoids that. Because for all the bad in this book, there's also so much fun in it. Laugh-out-loud, hilarious fun. He writes the poignant parts with depth and the equally-important laughs come naturally. This is one of those books I'd recommend to literally anyone, whether you're a reader of YA or not. This isn't about liking a certain genre or style of writing, this, my friends, is about appreciating amazing literature. And John Green writes amazing literature.

John Green’s approach to the ultimate existential problem (time) is rather brilliant. He has demonstrated with gut-wrenching accuracy, what it is like to feel like a ticking time-bomb, and what makes this love story exceptionally thought-provoking, is that it actually IS thought-provoking. Not simply because of its premise, but the way in which it is dealt with; seemingly mundane, and in every way imaginable, extraordinary. For children to be grappling with life-crises most adults postpone until old age is heart-breaking as it is, but also unfathomably eye-opening. And the questions raised, while paint an ugly picture of the cruel reality of being ill, help extricate nuances (by definition, small and seemingly insignificant) which are surprisingly powerful in changing one’s mindset about why we are here, why it is transient, and whether or not that’s ok. I was shook to the core by this narrative, and though it was becoming painful to sob uncontrollably every few pages or so, it was also incredibly cathartic because every single word confirmed a reality I know exists, but which I would never want to experience for myself. The Fault in our Stars is unprecedented. It is raw, ugly, spellbinding, beautiful, infuriating, heart-breaking, and most importantly, it forces you to feel. It has dawned on me that all things—whether in or out of existence—pertain to the ultimate existential crisis. Not simply as relevant to us as human begins, but as fundamental as what it means to be a rock. To be a collection of molecules devoid of what we as humans deem as ‘awareness’. It would take a lifetime to decipher the enigma of what life is, and at best it seems, the most satisfactory conclusion is: that we simply do not know. And it can seem disheartening, not knowing what it is about life we cling onto so desperately, and why we fear its loss the most, even though there are losses far more excruciating within the realm of our experience: loss of hope, loss of freedom, loss of self, of dignity, of time. And there it is: time. The one commodity we falsely assume we have enough of. And once you have managed to grapple with its uncompromising nature, once you think you have planned your life well enough to do all that matters to you with the time you've been given, you only wind up with more questions than answers; and not the kind of answers you find, but the kind of answers you concoct. And we do so, because not knowing what lurks in the dark is infinitely more terrifying than the death sentence itself. So what it is about, this 'life'? Is it about living it as comfortably as you can manage? Is it about self-actualization? About leaving something behind? Is it ultimately about deciphering it? And most importantly, is this 'meaning of life' universal, or is it as personal as it can possibly get? The most comfort I have found in questioning virtually everything there is to question has been this: That most certainly, the only thing certain thing about life and death is uncertainty. And I’ve found that acknowledging this fact has in many ways relinquished my responsibility of a life-long pursuit for answers I will never get. In some ways, that is the simultaneous beauty and pitfall of philosophy: raising more unanswerable questions, but broadening horizons in the process. So what do you prefer? Do you prefer never loving, never laughing, never experiencing neither the peaks nor the valleys of life, so that once death comes, you can easily part with this ‘life’ you have not lived? Or do you want experience every beautiful and ugly facet of life alike, so that when it comes to part with it, you simply cannot? It seems to me that if parting with my life is not the most tragic, frightening, and unbearable thing imaginable, then my dreams have not been big enough; that I have not been living a full enough life. And the last thing I'd want on my death-bed (or within the last seconds of still retaining my consciousness) is feeling like: 'I cannot believe I could, and I didn't.' I believe not having anything to lose is the most tragic thing about loss.

Adoro o livro e fiquei feliz com a leitura em inglês para praticar o idioma

Este libro es un clásico de la literatura juvenil. Te hace sentir todas la emociones y te recuerda lo importante de la vida. Solo hay que tener cuidado con el envío porque llegó un poco doblada la esquina de la portada pero fuera de ahí todo bien.

闘病生活に関する小説というと、主人公がつらいことがあってでも最後には何か夢が叶って死を迎えるという若干のハッピーエンドで物語が終わるものが多いように感じますがこの小説は一味違います。主人公がある種自虐的でユーモアのあるところもあり、楽しんで読めました。もちろん涙が出るところもありました。使われている英単語は平易ですが皮肉っぽく言う表現とか、phrasal verbsがよくつかわれているので一見簡単な文章でも正確に意味が取れないことがたくさんありました。映画を見てまた読み直したいと思います。