I have just finished reading a book written
by the best selling American author John Green which is called ‘The Fault in
Our Stars’ which I personally recommend to anyone.
On initially reading the blurb of the book
there was a moment where I prejudged what I thought
the book would be like and nearly didn’t read it. After reading it however
and promising to myself that I would most definitely read it again (and any
other John Green books for that matter) I felt inclined to write a review.
The book is centred primarily on a sixteen
year old girl called Hazel Grace Lancaster who suffers cancer and lives her
life tethered to an oxygen tank, the tumours tenuously kept at bay with a
constant chemical assault and a seventeen year old guy named Augustus Waters
who seems to analyze life throughout the entire book and has a metaphorical meaning
to everything his does. My favourite metaphor used by Augustus is shown right
at the start of the book whereby he takes out a cigarette and places it in his
mouth – unlit. When Hazel reacts badly to this he explains by saying,
“They don’t kill you unless you light them, and I have never lit one. It’s a metaphor, see: you put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do the killing”
This showing that you
choose how you act and life isn't dictated.
Augustus also fears oblivion.
Hazel looks at her situation as inevitable
death, but not so pessimistically. She doesn't want to be looked down on
because she has cancer. She wants to be treated like any other person, though
she knows that that will never happen in the real world. When she meets
Augustus for the first time, all the sees is her own flaws as she states in the
book,
“A non-hot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward, and at worst, a form of assault. But, a hot boy? Well…”
Hazel is also surprised when she finds that
despite the fact that she is a ‘grenade’ and despite her own flaws Augustus is
very interested in Hazel. Being with Augustus is both an unexpected destination
and a long-needed journey, pushing Hazel to re-examine how sickness and health,
life and death, will define her and the legacy that everyone leaves behind.
As this is only a review, I am not going to
go into detail about the plotline as such as I feel that it would be ruining
the magic of reading the book yourself. I recommend The Fault in Our Stars to anyone.
It is a hard balance to find when writing a
book, to make it happy and sad and will pull at the heart strings. It will make
the reader feel a whole array of different emotions and grow to love the
characters and their little quirks which make them different from any other, however
I do feel that John Green and successfully managed this.
Never judge a book by its blurb …. You may
one day regret it and miss out of a magnificent read which will keep you
interested until you turn the very last page just like ‘The Fault in Our Stars’
did and I will admit that it was the first book to ever make me laugh and cry
so much
“Reading is one of pleasures of existence!”