Kindle Book: The Fault in Our Stars

 The Fault in Our Stars

by John Green

Length: 321 pages

Format: Kindle book
Price: $3.99

Author Website: http://johngreenbooks.com/

Basic Premise: 17-year-old Hazel is plagued by a cancer that she will not survive.  Her life's purpose seems obselete until she meets Agustus Waters, a boy whose own experience with illness is similar, but whose outlook is curiously bright.

My Take: 8 out of 10 (scale here)

Up until The Fault in Our Stars, my only experience with John Green was Paper Towns, a book recommended to me by a YAL librarian.  I enjoyed it, particularly Green's tell-it-like-it-is style, but could never in turn recommend it to any of my students.  When a few of my friends started talking about this book on FB, and I saw that it was only $3.99 on Kindle and remembered I had a seven hour drive, I downloaded it.  Practically seven hours later, I finished.

This is not a warm fuzzy book.  This is gut-wrenching.  It's kind of like Speak (Laurie Halse Anderson) meets what I would imagine to be A Walk to Remember (Nicholas Sparks...though technically I couldn't make it through A Walk to Remember).  There were funny parts and then there were parts that made you question all of creation.  I was struck by many things, but perhaps the most significant was the fact that I am no longer putting myself in the place of the protagonist when I read YAL books - I'm now the parent.  And it was awful.  Every page was imagining your child - not yourself, which would be better - but your child at the hands of this ridiculously vicious disease.  We had some friends lose their five-year-old son to cancer just before my son was born and I still don't know how they make it day to day.  It was incredibly sad, but eye-opening and enlightening as well.  And obviously a quick read.