The Fault In Our Stars

CANCER BOOK + JOHN GREEN = NOT A CANCER BOOK

(Also known as The Fault in Our Stars)

“My name is Hazel.

“Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won’t be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story because – like all real love stories – it will die with us, as it should…

“I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s 0.1 and 0.12 and 0.112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2 or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”

Narrated through the eyes of sixteen year old Hazel Lancaster who is suffering from terminal lung cancer and has to carry an oxygen tank everywhere because ‘my lungs suck at being lungs’, The Fault in Our Stars is a refreshing slap in the face.

Apart from being sick, Hazel is just like anyone of us. She loves books and has a one-sided friendship with her favourite author, Peter Van Houten.

(Don’t we all?)

This book is about a girl who has cancer but it’s not a cancer book because as Hazel would say, ‘cancer books suck.’

Hazel meets Augustus Waters, who is recovering from osteosarcoma at a Cancer Kid Support Group.

Two kids with two lives, bleeding into one as their lives fall apart. The only silver lining in their lives is falling in love. Their story isn’t rainbows and sunshine. It isn’t straight-forward but it’s beautiful that way.  

According to the conventions of the genre, the story should have been about two characters who fight the cancer that ravages their bodies until their very last breaths. The characters will keep their senses of humours and will not at any point waiver in their courage, their spirits will soar like an indomitable eagle until the world itself cannot contain their joyous soul. Or they will miraculously survive even if realistically there was little to no chance of them doing so.

The sad truth is, they don’t. In the end, they are pitiful people who desperately do not want to be pitiful, screaming and crying, poisoned by an infected G-tube that kept them alive, but not alive enough.

This story is about love and making choices and just… life. It’s about life with all of its ups and downs and death with more downs than ups.

There are books out there that touch the bottom of your heart, wrench your eyes open and force you to see.

There are some books that will fill you to tears that you will feel so depressed days after reading the book and others where you’ll laugh so hard you find yourself rolling on the floor in hysterics.

There are others that make you so angry at how unfair everything is and then there are books like this.

Whilst reading this book, you want to laugh and cry and scream all at once. But you can’t.

So you read.

Books like this have the power to make or break its readers.

A book character can sweep its readers off their feet in love, can break one’s heart with pain and can make you roll on the floor laughing.

I’d need a dictionary to describe this book and even then I’d probably never have enough words to fully explain why this book just… works. But I’ll try anyway.

This book is: heart-breaking, devastating, depressing, moving, striking, overwhelming, breathtaking, harrowing, jaw-dropping and so many other –ing words I can’t think of.

“There are books which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”

This is one of those books.

This is probably one of the best and most realistic love stories I have ever and will ever read in my entire life. 

This book has taken me onto a rollercoaster of emotions and to be honest, I never wanted to get off because I just knew the ending would suck and leave me totally depressed.

“The world is not a wish-granting factory.”

And even if it was, you would still need to be positive and do what Augustus and Hazel did by just enjoying what we do have of life instead of concentrating on those little grains of sand that keep falling between our fingers until it’s all gone.

This story shows highlights the fragility of life and the importance of treasuring the things you do have in life instead of worrying over the things you don’t.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

The New Kid On The Block,

-          Linda.

Review: If I Stay by Gayle Forman

Title: If I Stay
Author: Gayle Forman
Release Date: April 2, 2009
Publisher: Dutton Juvenile
Find On: Goodreads and Amazon.

Quick Review:

Just listen, Adam says with a voice that sounds like shrapnel.

I open my eyes wide now.
I sit up as much as I can.
And I listen.

Stay, he says.

Choices. Seventeen-year-old Mia is faced with some tough ones: Stay true to her first love—music—even if it means losing her boyfriend and leaving her family and friends behind?

Then one February morning Mia goes for a drive with her family, and in an instant, everything changes. Suddenly, all the choices are gone, except one. And it's the only one that matters.

If I Stay is a heartachingly beautiful book about the power of love, the true meaning of family, and the choices we all make.

Detailed Review:

There’s this lump in my throat every. single. time. I read this book.

Tears start prickling in my eyes and all I want to do is bawl up and cry until I can't cry anymore tears.

I first got a copy of this book in July (2013) after hearing that there would be a movie coming out later this year.

Believe it or not, it took me 5 months to read this book.

But it wasn’t because this book was dead-boring or because I didn’t have the time to.

It was quite the opposite actually.

I literally could not read this book because… well… I guess it was because I just knew this would be one of those books.

The ones that make you want to curl up in a ball and do nothing for days afterwards because you’re too sad to.

I guess I wanted to deal with the aftermath of this book on my own. When I had the time to.

First published in 2009, “If I Stay” by Gayle Forman is different. I’ve never read a book quite like this one.

… And I like that.

It also poses a very good question: What would you do if you had to choose?

For me, the main character is refreshing. It feels like she could be my best friend. I relate to her not because of the tragedy in her life or anything of that sort. It probably sounds incredibly stupid but I’ve always had a soft spot for main characters that play classical music – be it the cello or the piano. It just happens.

I guess it’s because I’m a pianist and all that jazz.

Stupid, right?

There’s this suddenness about how everything falls apart so quickly. It’s like those moments you hear about all the time – where if you blinked, you would have missed it.

I can’t imagine going through what Mia did.

I guess I’m lucky that way. I hope I never will.

One minute, everything is going magnificently – the whole world is at your feet and the next… your whole world has been flipped upside down.

”You wouldn’t expect the radio to work afterward. But it does.

The car is eviscerated. The impact of a four-ton pickup truck going sixty miles an hour plowing straight into the passenger side had the force of an atom bomb. It tore off the doors, sent the front-side passenger seat through the driver’s-side window. It flipped the chassis, bouncing it across the road and ripped the engine apart as if it were no stronger than a spider web. It tossed wheels and hubcaps deep into the forest. It ignited bits of the gas tank, so that now tiny flames lap at the wet road.

And there was so much noise. A symphony of grinding, a chorus of popping, an aria of exploding, and finally, the sad clapping of hard metal cutting into soft trees. Then it went quiet, except for this: Beethoven’s Cello Sonata no. 3, still playing. The car radio somehow still is attached to a battery and so Beethoven is broadcasting into the once-again tranquil February morning.

At first I figure everything is fine. For one, I can still hear the Beethoven. Then there’s the fact that I am standing here in a ditch on the side of the road. When I look down, the jean skirt, cardigan sweater, and the black boots I put on this morning all look the same as they did when we left the house.” 

Oh, but the fragility of life.

It is the reality of things.

The sad, bitter, harsh and incredibly cruel reality of things.

The author has this way with words. He’s so descriptive, but not overly so. He has that natural balance that so many of us could spend a lifetime trying to perfect, but without talent, we would probably never quite get there.

If you had to choose between living and dying what would you choose?

For many of us, the answer seems simple.

“I’d want to live, duh.”

But it isn’t always.

Imagine having lost your loved ones, your blood relatives, the people you have known your entire life.

Would you still choose life?

I know this sounds crazy stupid but I wouldn’t.

Dying is easy… It’s living that’s hard.

I’ll be honest. Brutally and totally honest.

My family means the world to me.

My friends do too.

I probably don’t tell them this enough but they are the most amazing people in the whole entire world.

And I feel blessed to have them in my life.

I would take a bullet for my family and my friends.

They are the support system that keeps my head above the water when I think I’m about to drown.

And to lose even part of that support system?

To lose my family?

I think I’d fall apart.

This is one of those books that make you cry and laugh. I've read this book over a hundred times and I swear, after I finish reading this, I hold onto my family so much tighter and remind myself just how blessed I am.

If you haven't read the book, you definitely should and you should also check out the trailer and consider going to see the movie when it comes out in August.

Final Rating: 5/5 'Totally Amazing!'

Your Reviewer:

The New Kid On The Block,

Linda AKA Inno.

Goodreads profile