Wednesday 9 May 2012

the fault in our stars - thoughts and feelings


this is my thoughts and feelings of 'the fault in our stars' by john green. this is definitely not a review, because i don't know anything about literature (my cringey clockwork orange review from ages ago has shown me this). if you want to watch a review of this from a person that i trust to know her shit about books, then you should watch ophelia's book review video here, although she doesn't say much about it.

there will be spoilers from this point on, so if you haven't read the book, i suggest you head over to amazon, order yourself a copy, read it and then come back. or don't come back, just bloody read it, because it's worth it. 


so firstly i'd like to say that i have nothing bad to say about this book (except that it broke my heart). i cried so much. from the line "i never took another picture of him," onwards, i cried solidly through the book (so did milly, and you can watch her thoughts on the book here), and i don't usually cry like that over people whose taken names aren't planets (a little riddle for you there). this book hurt so fucking much.
i started reading this yesterday at about 4pm and i finished it about twenty minutes ago. yesterday i read up to when hazel gets the all-clear to go to amsterdam and then i went to bed. today i got home from sixth form and i picked up the book and when i got to that line, i couldn't stop crying so thought i'd better not stop reading. so, when i say 'the first half' or 'the second half' of the book, i mean the parts i read on monday or on tuesday, if that makes sense.
the first half was amazing. i felt like i connected a lot with hazel and that she was a kind of much better version of me. i fell in love with gus almost straight away. i usually always ignore character descriptions and make them up in my head for myself, and to me, gus was a guy who was almost identical to this guy who i like right now, but with darker hair. so i felt like i knew him, so it hurt so much more when he told hazel he was ill again. this sounds strange but the first half of the book made me feel so happy to be alive and to be healthy. hazel was so cheery that i felt stupid to not be cheery as well. plus, it was a page turner. i just spent two months dragging myself through dorian gray so it was really nice to read something so interesting and quirky. that's what i like about john green, he writes really good, insightful books but he writes them in that easy-to-read teenage fiction way.
the second half way awful. i was halfway to thinking that this was the greatest book i've ever read until it turned on me. gus' transition from strong, cheeky teenage boy to medically-dependant barely-there person made me feel physically sick. that horrible scene when gus is in his car and he calls for hazel to come help him, oh god i couldn't bare it. some people who've read this say that there was a part in the middle where nothing happened, but i didn't notice it. if there was, it was to show the contrast from healthy gus against what cancer made of him. the change was heartbreaking, i wanted him so much to be okay.
there were some phenomenal points made in this book (my favourite being the thing about remembering 14 dead people, and how hazel felt about the four aron franks), it was so interesting and insightful and amazing. it had all the magic that john green is known for, like his lines that just stand out and make you go, "bloody hell this man's a genius." there is nothing bad about this book. although i didn't love every second of the story, i think it says a lot that it made me feel as much as i did. if a book can make people cry even when they can't relate to the situations or emotions of the characters then it has to be good. just go read it, okay? it's bloody well worth the tears. xx



p.s. if anyone's interested, my copy of this book came with a cute note from a fellow nerdfighter. i love finding things in books, especially when they were written just for me. :-) dftba!

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