The Fault in Our Stars; John Green

Title:  The Fault in Our Stars

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.

The Kindle version is available for $3.99.