Expect to cry, laugh, wonder: ‘The Fault in Our Stars’

"The Fault in our Stars" by John Green

“I’m not a mathematician, but I know this,” says Hazel Grace Lancaster, the narrator of “The Fault in Our Stars” (FIOS), the 2012 novel by young adult fiction author John Green. “There are infinite numbers between zero and one. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others … Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.” The truth, she adds, is, “I want more numbers than I’m likely to get.”

Hazel is a 16-year-old cancer patient, who bluntly describes her life through wry humor and intelligent sarcasm. From the start, she’s relatable, funny and entertaining, when mocking the sappy routine conducted in the Support Group that her mom makes her go to.

“[I] listened to Patrick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story — how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn’t die and now here he is,” Hazel narrates dryly.

And although the days of Hazel, her boyfriend Augustus Waters and her friend Isaac are numbered, FIOS is NOT one of the cancer stories droned on in Hazel’s Support Group. There are no tubes, no scans, no gruesome details in this novel that’ll move you to tears.

Rather, FIOS stands out by focusing on how people deal with cancer — and how the people around them — deal with it all. It is “an epic love story,” Hazel describes her relationship with her boyfriend Augustus, and more.

Her oxygen tank and his prosthetic leg do nothing but make the romance more touching than a candlelit dinner could. Furthermore, FIOS includes friends, distant and close, and family, who all play in a significant role of the ripple effect of a cancer patient. So you’re reading a romance that doesn’t make you cringe with its sickening sweetness, but one that leaves you with awe and sorrow.

And Green tells this all in his trademark tone — melancholy, funny, touching and philosophical. His prose is to fall for. At one moment, he may eloquently say things so profound you’ll revel in the beauty of those words; and the next, he may spout nonsense about Hazel’s made-up headlines for her childhood swing advertisement: “Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children.” The contrast is astounding.

That’s what makes John Green the best young adult fiction author I’ve read so far. I tend to steer away from the young adult genre, but he doesn’t treat you like a teenager, with immature emotions and shallow qualms about life, unlike some of the authors I saw on that Teen Bestsellers shelf. (I’m looking at you, Stephanie Meyer.) Instead, he makes you feel like he understands you. It’s because his characters’ feelings are so human and so valid that I unexpectedly fell in love with them.

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal,” Hazel says, honoring her favorite novel, “and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”

That is, as wonderfully told by Green, precisely “The Fault in Our Stars.”