The Fault in our Stars. By: John Green

Time spent reading: 8hrs.

I joined a new job around this time and one of the movies I was working on was ‘Dil Bechara’ which is official adaptation of the book. I started reading the book to get an understanding of the movie but I stuck around as I found the writing interesting and the story fascinating.

This book at the right time for me, I was getting in the rut of turning towards the classics and straying away from ‘Modernism’

"[Augustus and Hazel's] love story is as real as it is doomed, and the gut-busting laughs that come early in the novel make the luminous final pages all the more heartbreaking". - Entertainment Weekly

Short Summary

The story revolves around the life of ‘Hazel Grace Lancaster’ and ‘Augustus Waters’ both teenagers. Hazel suffers from thyroid cancer and has come back from the brink of death thanks to the unrelenting efforts of her mother and the intervention of an experimental medical drug. As part of her recovery process, ‘Hazel’s’ mother insists that she goes to a support group of cancer survivors. This is where she meets ‘Augustus Waters’ who himself is a cancer survivor having lost a leg in the effort to fight his nemesis ‘Osteosarcoma’.

It is a typical boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, with Cancer as the constant 3rd Character in the story. The story moves along and Hazel introduces Augustus to ‘An Imperial Affliction’ a book written by the reclusive ‘Peter Van Houten’, Hazel is kid of obsessed with the book which is the story of a girl with Cancer and her mother, the story ends abruptly leaving Hazel frustrated. All her attempts to reach the writer and get an answer to her questions have failed, she even used her cancer card and it still does not work.

Augustus in his true knight in the shining armor comes to Hazel Graces’ rescue and with his literal dying wish asks an NGO to arrange for Hazel, himself and Hazels mother to be flown across the continent to meet the reclusive ‘Peter Van Houten’. The story further goes on to describe how these two tragic star-crossed lovers fall in love in the beautiful city of ‘Amsterdam’ and how they together try to negotiate the ever unpredictable life of a cancer patient.

My Review

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings” – Cassius from Julius Caesar by Shakespeare.

This line from the famous Shakespearian play is what has inspired the title of the book, this how is not a Shakespeare romance. The story moves in a linear manner and in a simple easy to follow timeline, there are flash backs, but it is not a very complicated timeline so at no point in time did I have to turn back the pages or re-trace my steps to keep up with the story. The writing is simple to understand and other than the technical medical terms it is also very easy to follow. There aren’t too many characters in the story, each of the characters in the story both living and fictional have a good back story and are given enough space to grow. This is a fictional story with made up characters, but they felt real.

The base of the story is a tragic one, but it is not a sob fest. For the most part this is love story between two interesting, strong and happy people with an underlying current of impending doom. The story is happy where it must be, funny and frustrating where it has to be.

The book and the original English movie made on it were both critically acclaimed and declared hits.

My take:

This very well written piece of literature. Green does a very good job in engaging the reader and keeping him interested till the very end. The most notable scenes are the characters interaction at Anne Franks house and their dinner date in Amsterdam