Book Review #12 - The Fault In Our Stars

Imagine this: You are on a date with an incredibly good looking individual. It is the first time you have met and you are bedazzled not only by your good fortune to spend time with someone so fine but also because it’s been so long since you’ve had this much fun on a date. You are having a great time and want everyone to know it. And then - there’s just this teeny tiny thing. You catch your incredibly good looking date watching himself (or it could be herself) with satisfaction in a mirror.  For just a bit too long. Your date is still beautiful and fun and interesting and one of the best you’ve had in a long time but....

I got that feeling while reading The Fault In Our Stars by John Green. I was twitter pated through page two hundred, at least.  Then, I noticed the navel gazing. By naval gazing, I mean that I became aware of the author’s probable vanity. His delightful main characters, Hazel and Augustus, are so esteemed in each others eyes.  Although both teenagers suffer from cancer, they make up in wit and comeback lines from anything they suffer in terms of health.  Everything they like, from authors to friends to music to food, seemed so, so smart. And they keep talking about it - how smart the other is. Their favorite fictional author, Peter Van Houten, plays a large role in the book and he is equally smart. Mean and drunk, but smart. Each of their sidekicks, though one is angrily blind and the other blissfully unaffected by life are hyper quick with fabulous diversions. Indeed, they are all very, very smart. Understand, I don’t mean book smart, though that element is there. I mean confident and thoughtful with themselves and others in that irreverent, brash, Gilmore Girl meets Ally McBeal kind of way (I realize this is a YA book and those two shows might be too old for the intended audience's to actually reference).  John Green wrote them all this way. And just like witnessing the self adoration in the mirror, I thought, “I think John Green must think of himself as awfully smart and funny.”

Still, I’m on this amazing date with a hottie. I don’t want to ruin it. So I pretend I didn’t see what I’m pretty sure I saw and relax and enjoy this smart and funny story about two kids whose lives are unfairly full of disease and compromise and whose lives will be ultimately be much too short. I enjoy their romance and their existentialism.  I laugh. I cry. I feel angry and protective and wishful. I think. A lot. I admire my date’s ability to repeatedly return to a recurring theme without it ever feeling redundant. In fact, his pacing is poetic and artful.

The world is not a wish-granting factory. Whether there is or is not a God, purpose in the stars or our own genetic mutations, Hazel and Gus are the kinds of people whose conversations about these things are ones I appreciate reading.