The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Originally Posted: January 15th

I 'literally' feel like my heart has been walked all over by Hazel Grace and Augustus Waters. Ha ha If you read the book do you like my pun?

This book has left me honestly distraught and many people will not understand getting distraught over literary fiction, but if you can cry over a film why can you not cry over a book? I am a true believer that words have more power than anything else. And the words in The Fault in Our Stars have been strung together in such a beautiful way that they have reached deep inside me and changed the very fabric of who I am. That is worth crying over

I almost do not want to read another book or watch another movie because I am terrified that I will forget Hazel Grace and Augustus Waters, or at the very least that their impression on me will fade, and at this moment in time I could not bear that.


The Fault in Our stars is about a 16 year old girl named Hazel who has been living the past two years on borrowed time after nearly dying from cancer. At 14 she is entered into a drugs trial that allows her to keep living, but for how long nobody seems to know, so since her miracle she has been patiently waiting to die while her parents try to get her to start living finally by sending her to a young cancer support group where she meets a perfect 17 year old boy, Augustus Waters who is an amputee and recovering osteosarcoma survivor. While Hazel is trying to pull herself away from everyone and everything in order to lessen the pain of her inevitable passing to the people she cares about, Augustus is slowly giving her reasons to live and trying to get her to let love in.


This book is brilliant in a terrible and wonderful way. I spent the first half of it laughing and thoroughly enjoying the relationship between Hazel and Augustus, as well as the other characters, and wishing I were more like them. They are two incredibly unique characters who I almost now regard as friends and if I should ever meet anyone who is as witty or intelligent as them I would feel blessed. The second half of the book however, or there abouts, destroyed me; heart and soul.

Hazel Grace is the sort of girl I always wanted to be, smart and witty as hell while being kind and selfless. She may be dying but she hasn’t succumbed to the clichés of her disease and eventually decided she will not let it define her.

I did not see that twist coming until a few pages before it was announced and even then I wanted to curl up and deny it. Everything that made me so happy unraveled then and there. If this book does not make you cry I don’t know what will.

Augustus Waters is also incredibly intelligent, obsessed with the metaphorical resonance of everything he does and is well known as one of the hottest (ex)basketball players in Hazels area. There were moments of course when Augustus annoyed me, but still he fascinated me and when the twist in Hazels story came I wanted to stop everything there and go back to when their relationship was as close to perfect as it could be in their situation. I wanted to just forget what was happening, but of course I could not. All I could do was read it to the end, although I could not believe that there would ever be a happy ending or any ending worth the pain.

I thought the ending Green came up with was perfect. It is literary symmetry. The way Hazels and Augustus’s book ended is very close to the way their favourite book ends. Without any knowledge of what happens to the characters left alive, but enough so that you can make up your own mind.

I still want to go cry in the corner about this book. It is so powerful that I think it is now my most favourite book ever, or definitely in the top 10, but I will read it over and over again savouring the relationships and characters because, as in life, this art reflects that not everything is perfect. You cannot suspend a happy moment in infinity. Everything ends, but then new things begin and while you have to suffer through life, people come into our lives and make it just that bit more worthwhile; even when they leave we are the better for having knowing them. That is how I feel about the characters in this book and how I imagine they feel about each other.

John Green has a beautifully terrible way of making you feel that, even when you are hopelessly lost in a bottomless pit of emotional despair that he single handily pushed you into, there still may be some hope to be found.

SPOILER ALERT!!!!
Augustus Waters, you have changed my life. Even though you are nothing more than a character in a book, I will remember you and so will many others. You achieved what you wanted. To be infinite. This book is just as much about you as Hazel
SPOILER ALERT!!!!!

Sorry for the crap review, I’m still distraught and on the verge of a breakdown.