The Fault in Our Stars is a young adult novel that truly embodies the emotional roller coaster of growing up with the added angst of being diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease. The main character, Hazel, has cancerous tumors in her lungs. Naturally, dealing with the idea of a potentially early death at such an early age creates all kinds of stress. Hazel, like many teens, rejects her parents’ advice on how to deal with her emotional stress and hates going to the local support group for young people with cancer. Instead she distracts herself with other things. The book An Imperial Affliction is a major obsession for her. On one fateful night, Hazel attends her support group where she meets an attractive young man and a passionate romance ensues. The plot twists and turns as Hazel and Augustus, previously mentioned attractive young man, travel around the world discovering what it means to live, love, and die.
This book is very raw when it comes to emotions and dealing with hard personal issues, mainly death. Grief and tragedy, very universal issues, are dealt with in good and bad ways by the main characters. However, the book is not all grief and tragedy; it also delves deeply into romance, familial love, and friendship. At almost 300 pages, this book could be daunting to some readers. However, the prose is easy and the narrative engaging which makes it very accessible to almost any reader. This book is also bound to be a hit with young girls. The “star crossed lovers” trope in this book will definitely attract fans of the Twilight novels and expose them to better writing and more mature themes. I could see this book alienating young male readers as it is told from the first person point of view of a teenage girl. There is also some sexual content which could raise some parents’ eyebrows. In my own classroom, I would recommend this book for emotionally mature individual readers.
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