Talk to The Fault in Our Stars like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Hazel Grace Lancaster is sixteen, has thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs, and attends a cancer support group mostly to appease her parents. There she meets Augustus Waters, a seventeen-year-old former basketball player with osteosarcoma who is currently in remission. Their relationship — smart, funny, literary, and unsentimental about what both of them are actually facing — is the engine of a novel that sold over ten million copies and became one of the defining young adult novels of the 2010s.
What John Green is doing in The Fault in Our Stars is harder to dismiss than its YA classification might suggest. The novel takes mortality seriously — not as a backdrop for romance but as the actual subject. Hazel and Augustus are not Hallmark-movie cancer patients; they argue about whether a life needs to leave a permanent mark to matter, they worry about the people they'll leave behind, and they are angry in ways that don't resolve neatly. The novel's central philosophical question — does it matter if no one remembers you? — is borrowed from Peter Van Houten, the reclusive novelist they both worship, and the encounter with Van Houten is one of the better structural choices in the book.
What it gets right
- 1.
The novel's central argument — that a life doesn't need to leave a permanent mark to have mattered — is taken seriously rather than resolved glibly.
- 2.
Hazel's anxiety about being a 'grenade' who will hurt the people who love her is one of the most specifically observed emotional notes in the book.
- 3.
Augustus's preoccupation with heroism and legacy is shown as both touching and adolescent — the novel is clear-eyed about which of them has the more honest relationship with death.
What it covers
Who wrote it
John Green is an American author, YouTube creator, and podcaster best known for young adult fiction with serious literary ambitions. His novels include Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, and Turtles All the Way Down. The Fault in Our Stars (2012) is his most commercially successful work, selling over ten million copies and being adapted into a major 2014 film. He co-hosts the Crash Course and Dear Hank and John podcasts with his brother Hank. He has spoken publicly about his OCD and anxiety, themes that surface across his fiction.
