The Fault in Our Stars
John Green (2012)
“A love story that refuses to lie about dying — and somehow that makes it the most alive book you'll ever read.”
At a Glance
Sixteen-year-old Hazel Grace Lancaster has terminal thyroid cancer. At a support group she meets Augustus Waters, a charming ex-basketball player who lost his leg to osteosarcoma. They fall in love over a shared obsession with a book called An Imperial Affliction. They fly to Amsterdam to meet the reclusive author Peter Van Houten, who turns out to be a drunk fraud. Augustus reveals his cancer has returned. He dies. Hazel eulogizes him. She discovers he wrote her a eulogy too — which Van Houten, of all people, delivers.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Sold more than 10 million copies in the United States alone. Spent over 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The 2014 film adaptation grossed $307 million worldwide. Credited with helping legitimize YA as a genre for adult readers and with raising the literary bar for teen fiction about illness. The novel's insistence that dying teenagers deserve complex interiority rather than symbolic simplicity was a significant cultural argument.
Diction Profile
Hazel's narration is conversational but intellectually dense — colloquial syntax with elevated vocabulary. A teenager who reads too much and thinks even more.
High