Author: John Green
Publication Year: 2012
Publisher: Brilliance Audio / Penguin
Edition: arc and audio
Reader: Kate Rudd (excellent)
Source: library
Date Completed: Sept - 2013
Rating: 5/5
I pretty much knew that this would
be a somewhat sad read going into it, but based on the glowing reviews, I
decided to join the masses who enjoyed The Fault in Our Stars so much.
The audio version is read by Kate Rudd, who did a fantastic job.
The story is narrated by 16
year-old, Hazel Grace Lancaster, who was diagnosed with stage IV, thyroid cancer at the age of 13. She's survived cancer thus far (3 years), but she has had to endure
experimental drugs, and now carries a portable oxygen tank with
her everywhere she goes.
Depressed (who wouldn't be?) and
taken out of her regular school during her treatments, she is encouraged to try
a support group for cancer kids. It is there that she meets, the handsome
17 year-old Augustus Waters, and the two engage in various philosophical
debates, and one thing leads to another -- before long becoming more than just
friends. Hazel is obsessed with a book about cancer called, An Imperial
Affliction and she encourages Augustus (Gus) to read it, so she can get
his opinion on the ambiguous ending.
Without giving away too much about
this novel, I'll just say that this book
is very much about being a teen and dealing with cancer, in addition to dealing with the other challenges healthy teens face. It's about making the most out of the
circumstances you've been forced to deal with. It's about love, life and
death, and the delivery is just so well done.
The story is full of beautiful
passages. I ended up highlighting these in my eBook edition after hearing some of
them on audio.
"The
marks humans leave are too often scars."
“There
will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time
when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed
or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember
Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and
wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have
been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of
years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive
forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there
will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I
encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else
does.”
“Sometimes,
you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you
become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together
unless and until all living humans read the book.”
“There
are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .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 a forever within the
numbered days, and I'm grateful.”
“Almost everyone is
obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting
death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is
being another
unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.”
“So, I guess we are who
we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even
if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose
where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay
about them.”
The Fault in Our Stars is a story
that you'll think about for a long while. It's such a touching story, one
that reminds us once again, that --- life, indeed, is hard and often unfair.
I enjoyed this book a lot and can't wait to see the
movie in 2014.
