Mini Review: The Fault in Our Stars

Review Date: May 10th, 2012

Cover Copy

Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.

Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is award-winning-author John Green’s most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love.

Review

Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, this story satisfies on so many levels — the characters’ humor was infectious, their romance unforgettable, and I can’t even glimpse the last page without fighting back tears.

First Line

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.

Favorite Lines

• This is not so much an author’s note as an author’s reminder of what was printed in small type a few pages ago: This book is a work of fiction. I made it up. Neither novels or their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the fundamental assumption of our species. I appreciate your cooperation in this matter.“
• Tell me my copy is missing the last twenty pages or something. Hazel Grace, tell me I have not reached the end of this book. OH MY GOD DO THEY GET MARRIED OR NOT OH MY GOD WHAT IS THIS
• …but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” Easy enough to say when you’re a Roman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.
• Mom couldn’t work because she had taken on the full-time profession of Hovering Over Me.
• You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
• The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and disappoint.
• How are the eyes?”… “Oh, excellent,” he said. “I mean, they’re not in my head is the only problem.”
• Look, let me just say it. He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy… well.
• I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.
• …the caption ‘Without Pain, How Would We Know Joy?’ (This is an old argument in the Field of Thinking About Suffering, and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.
• Bluie, the blue stuffed bear I’d had since I was, like, one — back when it was actually acceptable to name one’s friends after their hue.
• You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world … but you do have some say in who hurts you.
  
• I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
• …All salvation is temporary … I bought them a minute. Maybe that’s the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one’s gonna buy them forever … but my life bought them a minute. And that’s not nothing.
• I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.
• Trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you.
• You’re arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that’s a lie, and you know it.
• Sometimes people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them … But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.
• I’m in love with you … I am. I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.
• Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
• I want this dragon carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it.

Last Word

• do

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