“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

The Fault In Our Stars by John Green – My Book Review

Happy Tuesday! I finally finished reading this yesterday so I wanted to write my review! So spoiler alert, if you’re going to read the book STOP reading now, I will ruin it for you!

I’ll start by giving it a 3/10 on the crying scale. I would probably put The Notebook (the actual book) at around a 9 on this scale to give you an idea. Overall for reading quality I would give the book a 4/10. It was pretty slow, predictable, I found it boring at some points and the ending just failed to really pull at my heartstrings.

The book is about a girl named Hazel and a boy named Augustus, both of whom are suffering from some sort of cancer. They meet at a weekly cancer support group meeting and yup, you guessed it, they fall in love! So now the whole time you’re reading you’re just wondering which one is going to kick it first. The two main characters are both very smart, I did enjoy the witty banter between them. And I think the author did a really good job of capturing the emotions that terminally ill kids might be feeling. There was just one thing that felt out of place in the book, Hazel is obsessed with a book called An Imperial Affliction (totally fictional not a real book) that’s about a young girl with cancer and how her mother meets a wealthy man who plans to take them away and get the young girl this new cancer treatment. However, the book just ends, like stops mid-sentence so Hazel doesn’t know how it ends. She reads it over and over again and writes countless letters to the author asking him to tell her the ending. So then Augustus reads AI and also becomes infatuated with it and the story just swirls around this book and their obsession. I think I probably missed the deeper meaning here, I understood her obsession, but I would have liked more storyline about their developing love instead of book talk. The book ends sadly with Augustus passing away from a relapse however not before he wrote a eulogy for Hazel. It was sweet, but alas similar to An Imperial Affliction the book ends with the eulogy, so we don’t know what happens to Hazel, whether she ever gets better, what becomes of her parents and Isaac (a fellow cancer fighter).

I think this is one of those situations where the movie will be better than the book. I usually do not feel this way, but I think there is great potential to make it a bit more exciting for viewers. The movie is set for a release in 2014 and I was happy to see the actors who will be playing Hazel and Augustus on IMDB. It’s amazing how they can pick people that you already had imagined in your head!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2582846/