Cancer And Champagne

I have to be totally honest, I really had no intention of reading The Fault In Our Stars by John Green.  I am usually not a huge fan of the tug on the heart strings, tragic teenage stories and this was the pinnacle of that type of book.  However a trusted friend handed it to me and told me to read it and so I did.  In the end I was 100% right about the kind of book it is, but I am very glad I read it anyways.  As always SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!!

Hazel Grace Lancaster has cancer.  She is 17 and will probably die from it.  That my friends is a story, but not the story this book tells.  This book tells us to the story of Hazel and Augustus "Gus" Waters, who becomes the love of her life.  The story if fairly simple.  Teenage cancer girl with lungs that force her to carry around and oxygen cart and is living on borrowed time meets loud, boisterous, confident, one legged cancer boy.  They hit it off and bond over books, especially the favorite book of Hazel called An Imperial Affliction.  Hazel struggles with her health, and her place in the world of her loved ones, calling herself a grenade that will explode when she dies, hurting the people she loves.  Gus decides to use his "cancer kid wish" to take Hazel to Amsterdam to meet the author of An Imperial Affliction to try and get some of their questions about the ambiguous ending of the book answered.  They correspond with the author and his

assistant and get the trip all planned out.  Meanwhile another one of their cancer friends ends up losing a second eye to cancer, blinding him completely, leaving Hazel and Gus to help him survive this new state of being.  Hazel, Gus and Hazel's mom all head to Amsterdam, regardless of some of Hazels health issues, determined to have a good time.  Gus and Hazel share a wonderfully romantic meal on the canal's, which includes the most wonderful champagne, which is described as a glass full of stars.  The two go to meet with Peter  Van Houten, who turns out to be as my Mamma would put it, a total turd.  He is mean, pretentious, drunk and pathetic.  The two don't let the experience ruin their trip...but the revelation that Gus's cancer has come back and spread to his entire body does put a bit of a damper on things.  When they return, Gus enters palliative care, which is essentially a way to make him as comfortable as they can while he dies.  Hazel stays with him as the vibrant boy she fell in love with turns into a hollow, pain filled shell.  He dies and Hazel has to learn to live without him.  As a final gesture before he died, Hazel discovered that he had written her the most beautiful eulogy and sent it to Peter Van Houten to look it over.  It is sent back to Hazel and the book ends with Gus's final words to her.

So after reading this book, what do I think...hmmmm...I'm trying to figure out how to put into words how I feel about the book, without sounding as pretentious or nit-picky, or petty, or gushy. What cannot be put in the synopsis is the personality that the author put into this book.  Their is a great sense of what us EMT's call gallows humor, which is when you are surrounded by death on such a regular basis that you have to make jokes about it.  This sometimes seriously disturbs other people, but sometimes it is the only way to get through the day.  The reactions that the kids have to having this horrible disease of varying degrees of severity, the reactions of their friends and family were all fairly realistic and appropriate.  I think the biggest pro and con of this book for me personally, is that it was perfectly written for the YA age group, which is

awesome.  I find a lot of YA book either talk down to teenagers, assuming they are not as smart as adults, or they actually write to adults, but the content is considered YA so it is marketed as such.  This book however was written for the 13-17 age group, it speaks with the voice of a teenager, it is written with the immediacy of moment a teenager feels, it is written with the frustration of a person who is stuck between childhood and adulthood and then mixed in to all this is the constantness of cancer, which invades every "normal" teenage experience.  The down side to all of this however is that I am no longer a teenager (thank goodness) and so some of what makes this book perfect for the YA crowd came across as heavy handed and pretentious to me.  There was a fair amount of eye-rolling on my part, but then a weird nostalgia would come over me and I could totally remember feeling the intense emotion, and loving sounding like I was super smart by quoting random books of smartness.  Me and my crowd loved being "different" (are you liking all the quotes today?) and "esoteric" and all of that great stuff that made us feel "adult".  Overall it was a well written book, perfect for its target audience without talking down to them, or trying to also appease the adults. In fact I would be tempted to add this to my "if I was an English teacher required reading list.  It is a true YA book, which is perfect, I just it was around so I could have read it when I was 15 and gotten the full impact of it.  I give it 8 out of 10 nasal cannula's and recommend it anybody between the ages of 13-17, or anybody who needs reminded how tough, and yet wonderfully freeing it was to be a teenager.
What books do you wish you could have read as a child/teenager?  What do you think of books that intentionally tug at your heart strings?  Is gallows humor something you employ, or find distasteful?